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Mount Rogers Shelter Home has been restored after it sustained fire damage this past winter.

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Restored shelter home reopens

By DAN KEGLEY/Staff

Mount Rogers Shelter Home is back in business, welcoming its young residents for their first night on Friday, opening for public tours Sunday. The open house was a celebration of renewal and of the staff and residents’ safe escape last winter of an upstairs bedroom fire.
Twice-monthly fire drills were credited for saving lives, and firefighters were lauded for saving the building after the well-drilled residents took appropriate action.
“We would have lost the whole house if we had not had the doors shut and the windows shut like we were taught,” director Penny Dixon said said. Closed doors and windows reduce the supply of oxygen a fire needs, buying firefighters time.
After a fire erupted in a bedroom on a cold night last January, the home’s staff found other accommodations, for the young residents, who because of situations in their own homes are placed at the shelter home. All five got out safely.
“Nobody was hurt, nobody was even really dirty,” Dixon said at the time.
The boys lived for a while in a motel, and after weeks of securing permits, a residence became their new home. Both locations are kept private to maintain confidentiality for the residents.
The portion of the home’s second floor that didn’t burn sustained smoke and fire damage. Downstairs, ceilings slumped and sagged, saturated with the water that put out the fire.
Uninhabitable, the home stood silent and lonely with its boarded up upstairs windows, scorch marks, smoke stains around the trim, and a pile of charred, ripped up limber on the lawn outside serving as the only clues as to why the place seemed so lifeless.
The home’s board of directors deliberated about the shelter’s future – relocate or rebuild – but two months after the fire, Red Oak Construction Co. had contracted the restoration and begun the work, projecting about six months of reconstruction.  Red Oak specializes in post-disaster home and business renovations.
On Sunday, Red Oak’s H.C. Carter toured the home with visitors, accepting compliments for bringing back the home to a state of elegance.
“We tried to keep as much original as we could,” Carter said.
An initial estimate of $50,000 worth of damage quadrupled after insurance adjusters weighed in, but the home’s Debra Parks said previously she was hopeful that insurance will cover most of the $200,000 reconstruction bill.
Among the losses was a new heat pump unit upstairs.
Dixon was busy Sunday, greeting well-wishers, receiving words of congratulation and praise.
She was especially pleased to welcome Roger Massie and wife, Carol McLain, who drove from Waynesboro for Sunday’s open house. Massie, newly retired, had worked as the home’s licensing specialist in Richmond, Dixon said.
“He always loved coming down here, always admired the work you did,” McLain was heard telling Dixon.
“You always did a lot with what you had, and there were some challenges,” Massie said.
The home operates on United Way funding and other contributions. Human service agencies that send boys to the home pay a daily fee that does not cover all operating costs, Dixon said. The home has a capacity of 10 boys.
And two cats. Maggie and Rudy will be back next week, Dixon said. When the fire was over and she could go back inside, she found the cats, shaken by it all but unharmed.