A Ball State professor and his wife were injured after their Muncie home was engulfed in flame around 1 a.m.
Tom Price, an assistant professor of journalism, and his wife, Pam Price, are stable after firefighters pulled them from the blaze that claimed their house at 2801 Sequoia Court in Country Village late Friday night, Hamilton Township Volunteer Fire Department Chief Tim Baty said.
The two's injuries were mostly limited to oxygen deprivation, their son Fletcher Price told the Muncie Star Press, and he said the two were being intubated to restore oxygen to their system.
Pam called 911 while the two were trying to leave the house, Baty said, but were somehow unable to get out. Firefighters took Tom Price and Pam Price from the home when they arrived around six minutes after the 911 call.
The two were transported to Eskenazi Hospital in Indianapolis to be treated.
Some surrounding houses' vinyl siding was melted or sustained heat damage, but none caught fire, Baty said.
Brian Hayes, instructor of journalism, lives just a street down from the Price’s home and was awakened by the sound of firetrucks screaming through the neighborhood.
“[The sirens] sounded crazy close,” he said. “You look out the window and you saw this orange glow over the trees.”
He went outside to catch a better view of the fire, and to see how close it was.
“I walked down the street in between a couple of the yards and had a good view of the back of the house, which at the time I had no idea was [Price’s] house,” he said. “Then another neighbor of mine came out and we walked to the front and that’s when I realized, 'Oh my God, its Tom’s house.’"
Hayes said he spoke to some neighbors who said they saw Tom Price and Pam Price carried out on stretchers and assumed the worst.
“It’s just so surreal, you know, I’m almost 42 years old and I have seen a couple of fires in my time, but never fires like that, of someone I knew, so it’s pretty gut-wrenching to see the raw emotion of neighbors standing in their yard, crying and praying for them,” he said.
Hayes said it only took about 20 minutes for the house to go from a relatively small fire to a slab of concrete and a few wooden supports, which really made him think about his own family’s plan for what to do in an emergency.
“It really drills home the point that time is of the essence,” he said. “Really made us pause with our own kids and say ‘let’s talk about what you would do if something like that happened to us.’”
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