Bus driver, aide alert family of home fire

WASILLA — It’s usually the firefighters who come away from a blaze labeled as heroes, but Thursday they shared the spotlight with a bus driver and a bus monitor.

Alice Cruikshank and Holly Hinkle were making their regular rounds picking up pre-schoolers when they both spotted what appeared to be a burn barrel afire. It wasn’t long, they said in an interview Saturday afternoon, until they realized a home was on fire.

“She (Alice) got out,” Hinkle said about Cruikshank running to the home to see if there were people inside.

“I had to stay with the children,” Hinkle said.

While Hinkle was with the children in the bus, Cruikshank knocked on the home’s arctic entry door and nobody responded. She went to the main door and knocked again.

“I was thinking, ‘I hope they don’t shoot me,’” she said. “You never know. Maybe I watch too much TV.”

When the door opened, the house was filled with smoke. Cruikshank said she could see the silhouette of a woman’s legs, but “I couldn’t see her face.”

She said there was little oxygen and she heard a baby cry.

The woman handed Cruikshank the baby and she took her to the bus while the three adults inside made it out of the house.

One, she said, told her he had to put his socks on first.

All four made it out safely.

Central Mat-Su Fire Chief James Steele said the fire was reported in between 8:30 a.m. and 9 a.m. on Eider Circle between Hollywood and Knik-Goose Bay roads.

“A school bus was driving by and actually, when I was talking with the homeowner, he said it was the school bus driver and an attendant who was with her who came to the house and woke the family members that were inside and alerted them to the fire,” Steele said.

The family members — a mother and father, their adult son and infant granddaughter — made it out alive and unharmed. A second son had already left for work when the fire started.

“It was because of the actions of those individuals that there were not serious injuries or fatalities,” Steele said of the bus driver and attendant. “They’re the heroes in this one.”

Steele said the fire had just started to breach the home’s outer walls. It was burning around a door frame when firefighters arrived on scene. The door that was about to burn, he said, was about six feet off the ground with stacked up pallets being used as a porch and as stairs leading up to it.

“The house was under construction. It’s one that’s being built basically out of pocket, I think,” Steele said.

Firefighters managed to douse the flames before the fire got inside the house. Steele estimated damage to the home to be less than $10,000.

As for a cause of the fire: “We think it was from discarded ashes from the stove,” Steele said.

And as for why the homeowners didn’t notice the fire themselves; Steele said the home didn’t have smoke detectors. But it does now.

“We did install smoke detectors before we left,” Steele said.

Cruikshank said the owner told the afternoon bus, “Tell them thanks for waking us up.”

Cruikshank and Hinkle said it was team effort between bus dispatchers and emergency responders.

The next morning they went by the home on their regular route. Cruikshank said the house had lights on.

“That was sweet,” she said, adding about the memorable day, “We got the kids to school on time — maybe a minute late.”

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.