Her emotions were still right at the surface.

Five days after she, her boyfriend and her daughter escaped a terrifying house fire, Ardus Wertz was still trying to process what they had gone through. Too much reflection brought on tears.

“I’m still kind of in shock,” Wertz said Tuesday. “I’m still going through the motions of everything.

“It’s not really hit me.”

Wertz lost virtually everything she owns in a fire that gutted her mobile home at Terry Mobile Park in Coupeville last week.

But material possessions were the furthest thing from her mind Tuesday. All that mattered to her was that her 4-year-old daughter, Krystina Adams, was alive and healthy and fussing about returning to preschool and that her boyfriend, Eric Baum, was off a ventilator and scheduled to be released from the hospital that afternoon.

“I’m just so thankful,” Wertz said, fighting back tears.

Wertz, who goes by “Addie,” knows that older mobile homes such as the one she lived in often don’t fare well in fires and that the outcome could have been far more tragic.

When her trailer ignited just after midnight on Sept. 29, her daughter was trapped inside her bedroom as flames and smoke started filling the trailer.

It was the smell of smoke that abruptly awoke Wertz and sent her and her boyfriend rushing to the opposite end of the unit where her daughter was sleeping.

“I couldn’t get through,” Wertz said. “There were already flames coming up through the floor and down the roof right in front of her bedroom.”

While Wertz escaped through the back door and ran around the unit to try to break through her daughter’s window, Baum stood by the back door and was urged by neighbors to try again to reach her from the inside.

Baum ducked back inside and braved the thick smoke and flames to find Adams. They both crawled back through the house along the floor before Baum carried her outside to safety, Wertz said.

Within a minute and half, the home was fully engulfed in flames, according to Wertz.

“He’s the reason she made it out alive,” said Amanda Eley, Wertz’s sister and neighbor.

All three were transported to WhidbeyHealth Medical Center where they received treatment for smoke inhalation.

Wertz also was treated for cuts to her foot from broken glass. Her daughter had a second-degree burn on the bottom of one foot.

Baum’s situation was more serious. He was stabilized at WhidbeyHealth then transferred to Providence Regional Medical Center in Everett. He would remain there for five days.

He treated for severe smoke inhalation and placed on a ventilator to help clean out his lungs.

Wertz, who’s been staying with family, said the outpouring of support from the community has been remarkable.

A GoFundMe account set up for Wertz and her daughter had already amassed more than $2,300 by Tuesday.

“I’m in awe how quickly our community has come together to help out somebody they don’t even know,” Wertz said.

Although the official cause of the fire will go down as undetermined, the likelihood pointed to cigarette butts smoldering in a plastic ash tray on the front porch, said Ray Merrill, fire chief with the Oak Harbor Fire Department who was acting as a member of the Region 3 Fire Investigators Task Force.

The mobile home likely would have burned down much quicker had sheet rock not been added to the walls, Capt. Jerry Helm said.

Central Whidbey Fire & Rescue was toned out to the fire at 12:45 a.m. and sent a fire engine, water tender and brush rig from Station 53 on Race Road and another engine staffed with volunteers from Station 54 in Greenbank.

An engine with North Whidbey Fire also responded.

The fire stressed the importance of residents having functioning smoke detectors in their homes, said Charlie Smith, deputy fire chief with Central Whidbey Fire & Rescue.

Wertz said that her home had smoke detectors but they didn’t go off.

Smith recommended that batteries be checked monthly.

“We probably would’ve had five extra minutes,” Wertz said.

Central Whidbey Fire started a Home Safety Survey pilot program in late August, sending firefighters door-to-door to inspect smoke detectors and to offer and install free ones for those who didn’t have any.

The neighborhood where they kicked off the program was Terry Mobile Park.

“We were allowed to do the surveys at 23 of the 58 trailers at the park,” said Lt. Jen Porter, who’s leading the program. “We installed 18 smoke detectors. More were given out.”

Firefighters knocked on Wertz’s door that day but no one was home.

When Porter heard of the fire at the mobile park, that was one of her first thoughts.

She said that she was planning to return to the mobile home park again earlier this week and was expecting a more captive audience.

“You realize it’s a lot closer to home than you thought before,” Porter said.

To donate to the GoFundMe account to help Wertz and her daughter, one may go to www.gofundme.com/2rx9hp8