Family escapes injury as downtown Corbin apartments damaged by blaze Tuesday

Lisa Regan held one of her grandchildren Tuesday as fire damaged the Poplar Street duplex where she lives in Corbin. Fire officials say the fire was caused by a stove that was left on.

A pair of downtown Corbin apartments were damaged Tuesday evening, and a family is up in the air about where they are going to live following the blaze.

Police and fire department officials were called to 102 Poplar Street following a report of a fire and building collapse at the address between 6:30 and 7:00 p.m.

Although there were no signs that any of the building had collapsed, smoke was rolling from the windows and out from under the roof of the upstairs apartment at the duplex.

Everyone that lived in the two apartments made it out without injury.

Lisa Ragen, who lives in the downstairs apartment of the duplex, said she was sitting at the dining room table when one of the four grandchildren she has custody of ran in and told her the home was on fire. There were no signs from inside her apartment that anything was amiss.

“I said ‘surely not. What do you mean the house is on fire?’ I was like, ‘what is going on,’” she said.

“I looked out and saw smoke coming from the roof and I just told everyone to get out as quick as they could.”
Regan said her son, Will Regan, lived upstairs with his “old lady” and two children.

“They are saying that a pan of grease was left on the stove. He said he wasn’t cooking,” she said. “I know he cooked some fajitas at one o’clock today but I didn’t think he’d cooked anything after that.”

“I’m just glad everybody is OK.”

Corbin Fire Chief Barry McDonald said the blaze was caused after the stove was left on when Will Regan finished cooking.

“They had left it on and left the apartment to go get a haircut,” McDonald said. “When we got there, there was fire coming out of the eaves on both sides.”

McDonald said fire officials are not investigating the blaze as anything caused by criminal intent.

Regan said she was able to move her car away from the building to make sure it didn’t catch fire.

She said both she and her son rent the property and neither had a renter’s insurance policy.

“I don’t know what we are going to do right now,” she said. “We just paid rent yesterday. We’ll have to figure something out.”

Firefighters with the Corbin Fire Department quickly had the blaze under control and were still working on extinguishing the blaze at press time.