MORGANTOWN – It didn’t take Mark Thomas long.
“Yeah, there it is, I’m pretty sure,” he said as he scanned the twisted metal. “My Jeep.”
Thomas was regarding what used to be a service bay at PH-Q Pride Honesty Quality Inc., the auto garage on the Mileground that was consumed by fire the afternoon before.
And, as it turned out, what also used to be his aforementioned ride.
Whatever happened – happened quick.
Motorists on their way home from work reported seeing flames roiling from the roof of the garage around 4:45 p.m., and the smoke was so persistently thick that police wound up closing down the busily traveled thoroughfare for a time.
That was while fire crews from Brookhaven, Morgantown, Star City, Cheat Lake and Westover did their work at the scene. The companies had the flames knocked back around two hours after the first dispatch.
Calls to the garage’s owner Tommy Keener weren’t immediately returned Tuesday, though he did tell The Dominion Post photographer Ron Rittenhouse that he suffered burns on his hands while trying to move vehicles out of the path of the flames.
At the height of it all, Love Savior, a longhaul trucker from New York City and Texas who ended up in the Mountain State by way of the Marcellus shale boom, took a cellphone call from his wife.
She spied the smoke from the other end of the Mileground. Like Thomas, she too was invested.
Her Mitsubishi SUV was there, having work done.
Savior met up with his spouse and they watched the flames from the Sheetz next door.
Which, he allowed, was dicey for a time.
“Yeah, they shut off the pumps as a precaution,” he said. “Then you had the weather.”
A sudden snow shower blew through – with dropping temperatures – just to confound the issue.
The day after, Savior was taking video and snapping pics with his phone of the vehicle, parked along the side and looking reasonably intact.
“We’ll let the insurance take it and see what happens,” he said.
“The important thing was that no one got seriously hurt.”
Thomas agreed, and was stoic, as he steered the assessment of his 1996 Jeep, which was being restored by the garage.
“You can’t really do anything with it now,” he said.
