Four days before her wedding, Jessica Hinchcliff lost nearly everything she owned Wednesday when a rekindled fire destroyed her Edgewood Homes apartment.

Among her lost possessions, she thought, were wedding rings she and her husband-to-be were to exchange during Saturday’s ceremony.

“I didn’t think there was much of a chance of finding them,” Hinchcliff, 22, said Wednesday afternoon as she stood near the charred rubble where her apartment once was. “It was like a needle-in-a-haystack thing.”

But after hours of digging by hand and using a metal detector, Rich Barr, fire marshal with Lawrence-Douglas County Fire & Medical, called Hinchcliff and said the rings had been found.

“A neighbor told him I had rings in there,” Hinchcliff said. “He spent nearly four hours looking around for them.”

Barr, however, said there were other firefighters searching for the rings.

“There were six firefighters who spent the morning digging around on their hands and knees,” Barr said. “They deserve all the credit.”

Firefighter Will Hallagin actually found the rings. They were still in a box, he said.

“It was gratifying to be able to do that for someone who had lost just about everything else,” Hallagin said.

The rings were typical gold bands; Hinchcliff’s ring had some diamonds on it, she said. They had been stored in a dresser drawer. The fire tarnished the rings, and they need to be taken to a jeweler to be cleaned.

“It would have been hard to replace them,” Hinchcliff said.

The wedding dress was kept at another location and was not lost in the fire, Hinchcliff said.

Hinchcliff, a Kansas University junior from Lawrence, and her fiance, Sean Rudisell, 22, will be married Saturday at Kansas University’s Danforth Chapel.

As for Barr, “He has a big heart,” Hinchcliff said.