Fire at AER

Surviving the Fire

Aiken Equine Rescue Perseveres

By Pam Gleason

April 3, 2021 had been an ordinary Saturday at Aiken Equine Rescue, a 90-acre nonprofit horse rescue farm located on Aiken’s Southside. The day had been bright and sunny with highs in the 60s during an unusually cool and dry South Carolina spring. Volunteers had been on the property to care for the horses; a few people had been in for tours. Caroline Mulstay, the rescue manager, fed the horses and went home at around 6 o’clock. Debbie Rhodes, a board member who is married to Jim Rhodes, the rescue’s president, had spent most of the afternoon riding and doing outdoor things around the farm. Nothing seemed different or out-of-place.

A little before 7, Debbie decided to go in and get ready for dinner. She and Jim have a home on the property, and she had just gotten inside and taken off her boots when she heard an explosion.

“I can’t even tell you how loud it was,” she said. “It was much louder than fireworks or anything like that.”

She pulled the blinds back in her house and looked out at the stable. To her shock, it was totally engulfed in flames. Without stopping to put on her boots, she ran out, barefoot, calling 911 on her cellphone. She had one thing on her mind. While the horses at the rescue generally live outside in spacious paddocks with run-in sheds, there was one animal in the stable. This was a miniature pinto pony named Whistle. Whistle had recently been taken in by the rescue after being mauled by a dog. He had needed extensive surgery to repair his muzzle and had spent time in the clinic at Performance Equine Vets. Now that he was home, he was living in a corner stall. Debbie’s only thought was that he needed to get out.

The stable at AER was a concrete block structure with concrete aisles, but wooden struts and a wooden, shingled roof. It was a shedrow style with an office, and every stall had two doors, back and front. Only three of the stalls were normally used for horses, while the others were used for tack and equipment storage. Debbie ran around the back of the barn to the paddock that connected to Whistle’s stall.

“Thankfully he was in that stall, because that was literally the only one I could have gotten to – the others were so engulfed that I couldn’t have gotten to them from either side,” she said. “His stall was already on fire: the roof was on fire, the shavings were on fire, and there was so much smoke you couldn’t see a thing. So I couldn’t see him.”

She couldn’t hear him either. She had no personal experience with stable fires: she had only seen them portrayed in the movies and on TV. In the movies, horses trapped in burning stables are frantic and whinnying. Whistle was doing none of that. Debbie was afraid that he was already dead.

But she put her shirt over her face to filter the smoke and went into the stall anyway. Feeling around, she found him still alive and standing, and so she wrapped her arm around his neck, since she had no halter or lead rope, and she led him out of the barn and into the adjoining field and she set him loose. “There was nothing else I could do.”

“He didn’t seem panicked or anything like that,” she continued. “But when he came out his mane was on fire, and the hair on his back was singeing, so he definitely had some burns on him.” Whistle did not seem to recognize his predicament at all; nor did he seem to be clinging to the perceived safety of his stall. “I wouldn’t say he was reluctant to come with me, but he was certainly in no hurry to come.”

Once outside, Whistle trotted off – recently gelded, his first thought seemed to have been that he wanted to find some mares to breed or some other male horses to fight with. With him safe, Debbie called her husband Jim and she called Caroline Mulstay.

“I didn’t think there were any other horses in the barn, but we move horses around all the time. So I called her to say ‘Please Caroline, tell me there were no other horses in the barn.’”

Fortunately, there were not. Within moments, neighbors showed up to help, and before ten minutes had passed, fire trucks and firefighters arrived to douse the flames. There was no chance of saving the structure as it was already essentially gutted when Debbie called 911. The rescue lost pallets of feed, many bales of hay, all its tack and equipment, and thousands of dollars worth of donated medical supplies. The fire jumped to a trailer full of tack. The office and all its equipment went up in flames. “For weeks, we discovered more things we had lost,” said Caroline.

When Caroline got back to the rescue that evening, the firemen were already at work, and her main priority was to get Whistle back to Dr. Sabrina Jacobs at Performance Equine Vets for a full evaluation and treatment.

“He seemed like he was fine, and I already had a vet on the way to check him out, but Dr. Jacobs said that the effects of a fire can take time to show up,” said Caroline. When she trailered the pony to the clinic,

she saw that this was true. “He looked burnt like a marshmallow: his hair was brown where it had been white. When they shaved it off, you could literally see the burn developing on his back: he started blistering and if you touched him you could feel that the flesh was not healthy.” Dr. Jacobs advised that thermal burns on a horse can take 24 to 36 hours to fully manifest themselves, much like a sunburn on human skin.

Fortunately, Whistle’s burns did not end up being very deep, and after a few days of treatment his wounds scabbed over and he was on his way to a full recovery.

The news of the fire spread rapidly through the Aiken and equestrian communities, and immediately the rescue was showered with offers of help. Monetary donations poured in through the website and Facebook page. Amy Hebert and Charles Doremus, who own Aiken Saddlery, opened up their store on Sunday – it was Easter Sunday – so that the rescue could get whatever feed and supplies it needed that day. Lowes

and Home Depot offered to help rebuild. Members of the community showed up with donations of tack and equipment – there were so many people coming to drop things off that the rescue stayed open into the afternoons (it was normally closed), manned by volunteers to accept all the donations. This went on for at least two weeks.

And although the fire was devastating, Caroline Mulstay and Debbie and Jim Rhodes agree that it could have been much worse. Not only were no horses lost in the blaze, but some things were miraculously saved. For instance, the office computers melted but the hard drives in them were retrieved, and Staples in Aiken was able to restore all the data to new computers that they donated to the rescue.

“We got back all our records, all our pictures, everything,” said Jim Rhodes. “It was incredible.”

By June, two months after the fire, most of the debris from the barn had been cleaned up and hauled away – it took several weeks and five dumpsters. The remains of the office were still standing, but were finally ready to be taken down. After several investigations – from the fire marshal and then from the insurance company – no cause for the fire had yet been discovered.

“They think it was most likely electrical or chemical,” said Caroline, explaining that chemical reactions are an underappreciated cause of barn fires. Sometimes, chemicals stored near one another, even in closed containers, can react and catch on fire. Hay that is baled with too much moisture in it has been known to spontaneously combust. Storing flammable chemicals such as gasoline or kerosene in a barn is obviously dangerous, but there are some other items, such as fertilizers, paint, alcohol-based products, and even liniments and shampoos that can also combust or act as accelerants once there is a spark.

“One thing we learned is that it is a good idea to keep an inventory of all the medical supplies and chemicals in your barn,” said Debbie. The fire marshal also recommended obtaining and reading the Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDS) for any chemicals you have to make sure you are not courting disaster. “It’s also a good idea to have halters and leads available outside the barn,” continued Debbie. When she rescued Whistle, she was able to coax him out without any of those things, but this may not have worked if he had been a big horse rather than a mini pony.

Another lesson was that, despite their reputation for safety, concrete barns do not necessarily have much advantage over wooden structures when it comes to fire, and they may even have some disadvantages.

“A cinderblock barn is very, very safe for hurricanes and tornadoes. It’s not safe for fires,” said Caroline. “What happens in a fire is that a concrete barn acts like an oven, raising the temperature inside. That’s one reason they haven’t been able to find out where the fire started and why: the damage was so bad that there was no place inside where the damage was worse than anywhere else.”

The fire was so hot, it even destroyed the cinderblock walls. They did not catch on fire, but they lost their structural integrity and crumbled easily. “It was almost as if they were turning back into sand,” said Caroline.

The rescue has plans to rebuild and has set up a special fund for the rebuilding project and a capital campaign is in its planning stages. Although the stable was insured, with the current high cost of lumber, it turned out to be significantly under insured, and the contents were mostly not insured at all. But Jim Rhodes says they are in no hurry, and have yet to determine exactly what type of barn they will have. In addition to needing funds to help rebuild the barn, the rescue also needs donations to help feed and care for the horses in its care, since all the regular maintenance, feed and veterinary costs are still there. And despite everything, the rescue’s mission has not faltered. They have adopted out horses, including one on Monday, just two days after the fire. They have sent another horse that they took in, an off-the-track Thoroughbred, to have an operation to repair a hernia. They held their annual fundraising auction.On June 19, they will hold a tack sale. Although they have lowered the number of horses on the farm, they are still taking in some difficult cases, even though they have had to turn many away. “The need is still out there, the need is tremendous,” said Jim. Everyone involved with the rescue is extremely grateful for the support and well-wishes of the community. In recent years, Jim has often volunteered to help out in other parts of the country where there were horses in need – bringing feed and hay to flood-ravaged Texas, offering assistance to horsemen in Florida after a hurricane. So it is not really a surprise that in addition to local donations, funds have also come in from both of those states, as well as from Canada and as far away as France.

“It just shows that if you pay it forward you get it back,” said Jim. “A long time ago, someone told me that when you hit an obstacle, you have a choice,” he continued. “You can make it a brick wall, or you can make it a speed bump. When this happened, I thought at first that it was a brick wall. But I have decided that it isn’t. It’s a speed bump . . . a little speed bump. We’ll be back.”

For more information or to make a donation to help the horses, visit aikenequinerescue.org.