A well-known Hilo artist and writer whose rented home and studio burned down in a fire on Oct. 30 described himself as “a lucky son of a gun.”
Tomas Belsky, 81, said he’d just finished a piece he’d been writing on a new computer about 10:15 that morning when “the electricity went off, just like that” at his Kou Lane home in Wainaku.
“I jumped up from the bedroom, where I had the computer, and I went in the back room, and it was filled with smoke,” Belsky reflected on Tuesday. “I go into there, and I see flames shooting up from downstairs. … I tried to put it out with a hose that I had downstairs. That was futile as hell.”
Belsky escaped with only the clothes he was wearing — a T-shirt with two pens attached, work shorts and a pair of sneakers.
“And that was it. My pocketbook with my ID, my keys to the car, everything was inside,” he said.