THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, April 6, 1995 TAG: 9504060379
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B5 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: NORWOOD LENGTH: Short : 45 lines
All William R. Martin could do was watch as a forest fire burned its way toward the house in a small wooded clearing that has been his home for 35 years.
``We could see the fire coming right across here,'' Martin, an 84-year-old retired railroad worker, said Wednesday as he surveyed charred land near his home, part of the 1,200 acres blackened by wildfires in Nelson County since Tuesday.
On Tuesday, firefighters told Martin and his wife, Ruth, 76, to leave the house Martin's father bought in 1939. They spent the night with their daughter and found their house still standing the next morning.
Several fires elsewhere in central and western Virginia scorched more than 1,700 acres Wednesday, including a loblolly pine plantation along the James River. Only one house, an unoccupied vacation home in Page County, has been destroyed.
The Martins were lucky. Their house sat in the middle of a circle of green lawn amid burned woods and fields.
Firefighters ``said these ditches they cut out here were the only thing that saved it,'' Ruth Martin said. ``These woods and fields can grow back, but my house won't grow back.''
Virginia officials expect a busy and dangerous forest fire season. Dead limbs and trees caused by 1994 ice storms and a lack of rain turned forest floors into tinder boxes. This week's fires were fanned by winds that reached 40 mph.
Firefighters from the Virginia Department of Forestry and scores of local fire companies across the region began bringing the fires under control after temperatures plunged early Wednesday and winds abated.
Firefighting was fiercest at Old Norwood Plantation, an antebellum spread of 1,700 acres along the James River in Nelson County, which was badly damaged by the fire.
KEYWORDS: FOREST FIRES by CNB