Due to the severe burns on her hands, Melissa Shaw has had part of her middle and ring fingers removed (Picture: BPM media)
A woman has suffered severe burn wounds after heroically saving her granddad from a caravan that went up in flames in Skegness.
Melissa Shaw, 33, had travelled to Coral Beach Holiday Park, Ingoldmells, for a weekend getaway with her grandparents, mother and aunt.
After spending the night in the caravan, Melissa woke up at 5am to the smell of smoke and the sound of alarms as flames ripped through the vehicle.
The family rushed to escape the inferno, with the 33-year-old care worker suffering the most severe burns, before she realised her 80-year-old grandfather, Michael Thornton, was still inside.
She says: ‘I can’t remember if it was in my bedroom or the other room, I just remember trying to put a fire out and that’s how I got the burns on my hands.
‘Then I woke my aunty up, and I was shouting for everyone.
‘My mum was already awake and shouting, and then me and my aunty went out of one door and my mum and my grandma went out another, and I was like “where’s my grandad?”‘
Ms Shaw described how she rushed back into the burning caravan to save her granddad despite having already suffered extreme burns to her hands.
‘I couldn’t get him because of the injuries to my hands,’ she told the MailOnline.
‘I managed to get him out of bed but then he was at the bottom of the bed and I couldn’t get him out of the caravan by myself.’
Mr Thornton bought the family caravan after he retired (Picture: BPM Media)
Melissa Shaw and her grandfather Michael Thornton (Picture: BPM Media)
Ms Shaw decided to ‘scream and shout for help’, before the next door neighbour at the park rushed to the scene and helped drag her grandfather to safety.
The family were all taken to Boston Pilgrim Hospital to be checked after the incident, while Lincolnshire Police evacuated those in nearby caravans.
The force said a ‘scene guard had been erected for public protection’, adding that the fire was not being treated as suspicious.
Ms Shaw from Bradford, Yorkshire, was the only family member to suffer injuries, which she spent three days in the hospital receiving treatment for.
She says: ‘Because they don’t have a burns injury ward they couldn’t do much for my burns, it was more keeping an eye on my breathing because of the smoke inhalation and because I have asthma it was playing up.’
The family say they ‘lost everything’ in the fire, which has since been ruled as accidental, as the caravan was uninsured.
Ms Shaw adds: ‘They have looked into it and the caravan was not insured, they can’t do anything about it.
The aftermath of the caravan fire at Coral Beach Holiday Park (Picture: BPM Media)
Police said the fire was not being treated as suspicious (Picture: BPM Media)
‘It was my car as well that set on fire, and my car is insured and stuff but it was on finance and the insurance won’t cover all the finance and the excess fee.
‘Some of us lost literally everything. I lost everything, even the clothes I was wearing because the hospital had to chop them off me to see if I had more burns anywhere else.
‘They chopped the rings off my fingers.’
Ms Shaw’s mum and grandmother managed to save their handbags from the fire, while her aunt and grandfather also lost their belongings.
‘My main concern was to get everyone out of the caravan, I wasn’t thinking “grab this, grab that”.’
Due to the severe burns on her hands, Ms Shaw has had part of her middle and ring fingers removed, and is expected to be off work for three months while waiting on a skin graft.
Her niece, Leah Dibb, has set up a GoFundMe page for the family, which has a goal of raising £1,000.
The 23-year-old said: ‘Everyone is back home and everyone is pretty much all right, except for my aunty – she is suffering from really severe burns on her hands and she’s going to have to have multiple surgeries and it’s going to take a while for them to heal.’
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