By Zaz Hollander
The Alaska Dispatch News
MEADOW LAKES, Alaska — Houston Fire Chief Tom Hood has spent more than 20 years going after fire to save other people’s homes.
Last weekend, fire came for Hood.
An aggressive blaze that started at the back of Hood’s two-story home near North Pittman Road severely damaged the house he built on property purchased for $10 as a home site in 1980.
By the time crews got the fire under control, the back of the house was a charred skeleton and two Yorkshire terriers inside were gone. A third dog was rescued by a neighbor.
Hood and his wife, Donna, lost nearly all of their belongings, as well as those of their 4- and 6-year-old grandchildren, whom they are raising. They’ll have to rebuild.
“It’s just devastating,” Hood said Monday, as he got ready to drive to work at the Houston fire station.
The Hoods and their grandchildren are now living in a 26-foot camper on the property.
The home was insured. Hood is meeting with an insurance representative Tuesday. The American Red Cross of Alaska is helping the family. Still, Hood said, he spent $1,500 at Wal-Mart over the weekend just trying to bring a sense of normalcy with a TV for the camper, plus toys and DVDs.
He said he doesn’t know what caused the fire, only that it apparently started in a second-floor bedroom.
The dogs were in an entry below that room. Firefighters found the body of one, 7-year-old Yorkie, but not an 11-year-old named Isabel, Donna Hood said Monday. She’s holding out hope the female ran off and may still show up.
Hood’s home on West Greensward Drive isn’t in Houston, but in nearby Meadow Lakes, an unincorporated community between Wasilla and Houston. That’s an area covered by West Lakes Fire Department. Hood served as chief of the Meadow Lakes Fire Department for eight years and served as a firefighter there before it combined with Big Lake to form West Lakes.
West Lakes responded Friday, along with borough firefighters from Central Mat-Su Fire Department and Houston’s fire department.
The cause of the fire remains under investigation, according to West Lakes Fire Chief John Fairchild, who came by to see Hood at Houston’s new fire station off Hawk Lane on Monday.
A neighbor called 911 to report the fire after 2 p.m. Friday, Fairchild said in an earlier interview. About a third of the house was engulfed in flames when responders arrived. He called the fire a “routine structure fire” made different by the family involved.
“Any fire is critical to us, but when it’s close to the firefighting family we have concerns,” Fairchild said. “It’s not a priority, of course, over any other fire.”
Hood’s property is assessed at a little over $167,000, according to a Matanuska-Susitna Borough property listing. His insurance should cover the home as well as belongings, he said.
Houston Fire Chief Tom Hood, right, visits with West Lakes Fire Chief John Fairchild Monday morning, June 13, 2016, at the Houston fire station. Hood lost his home in Meadow Lakes to a fire Friday afternoon. (Zaz Hollander / Alaska Dispatch News)
Tom and Donna Hood met in the subdivision and got married next to a lilac tree that started out as little more than a branch in the ground. He bought the property for $10, and then bought a chainsaw and a tent with the first Permanent Fund Dividend check he got after that, Hood said.
“We started in a little cabin. I mean small,” Donna Hood said Monday. They raised their three children in the main house.
The Hoods’ loss marks the second time a Houston responder has lost a home to fire.
A department engineer, Shawn Skiles, experienced the loss of the home he shared with wife Cecilia not once but twice -- in September 2014 and again in October 2015, as reported in the Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman.
Another Mat-Su emergency responder, Bill Gamble, now the borough’s emergency services director, was a Lakes chief in 2009 when fire destroyed the Big Lake storage unit where he lost more than $100,000 worth of personal items.
Hood, who’s seen any number of destructive house fires over his years, said the experience of losing a home and everything in it gave him a new perspective.
“It’s totally different when it’s your home and your belongings,” he said. “You never know what you leave the people behind, when you say, ‘We’re going to turn the property over to you, and we’re sorry for your loss.”
Copyright 2016 Alaska Dispatch News