Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, July 21, 1990 TAG: 9007210209
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: RON BROWN STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Driving away from a Tazewell convenience store Thursday night, he unknowingly had a gas pump in tow.
Moments later, he feared an explosion as flames licked the rear bumper of the borrowed van he was driving.
Still, Duff considers himself a lucky man.
"I just lost my gas cap," he said. "It just scared me like crazy."
Duff was driving home to his wife and three young children in Tazewell about 10:30 when he noticed the the fuel gauge registering "E".
He pulled up to the pumps at the West End Short Stop on West Main Street in Tazewell and jumped out of the van. He slid the nozzle for super unleaded gas in the lip of the van's gas tank. He fixed the nozzle so it would automatically pump and ran inside the store to pick up a few things.
Duff strolled back to the cooler and grabbed a bottle of Gatorade before picking some licorice off the shelf to take home. While inside, he called Pizza Hut and ordered an Italian sausage pizza for a late dinner.
He noticed that the meter registering his gasoline intake had hit $15 and was still running, so he chatted a few minutes with the clerks. He paid his bill, then walked out to his van and jumped in the front seat before noticing he'd left the dome light on.
He shut if off and drove away from the pumps.
"At first, I didn't hear anything," Duff said. "Then I heard a girl screaming. She was screaming loud."
What he saw in his rear view mirror startled him.
"I saw another girl flying toward her car. I was wandering what she was doing. I just kept on going and then I heard glass breaking and the crackling sound of fire. When I saw the pump at the store was on fire I realized why the girl was screaming."
And as another woman continued yelling, Duff realized that as he drove away from the store, he pulled one of the pumps from its stand.
"She wanted to get me out of the van before it blew up. The fire was bleeding right up to my gas tank."
He scrambled to roll down the window, reached out and opened the door from the outside. He stopped the van and ripped the nozzle from his gas tank as the pump from the store burned just a few feet away.
Back at the store, the fire had spread to another pump, sending flames 5 to 6 feet in the air as the clerks called the fire department.
"I had not a clue what to do," said Stephanie Baker, a clerk at the store. "I'd never been near a fire. We were just freaking out."
The fire had already singed the side of one car.
After receiving a crash course over the phone on how to operate a fire extinguisher, Baker doused the blaze with chemicals before firefighters completely extinguished the flames.
"It burned the pumps to the ground," Baker said. "It's pretty much a mess out there. We had a pretty rough time."
by CNB