Cigarette likely saved woman’s life

HOUSTON — As rescue stories go, the story of what happened Wednesday on Meadow Creek is hard to top.

What police, firefighters and medics were able to piece together afterward, the story goes something like this:

A woman in her 70s left her home to have a cigarette and walked down to the creek at about Mile 1 Big Lake Road.

At about 5 p.m., a group of people working outside on some benches heard a noise and went to investigate, said Christian Hartley, spokesman for the Houston Fire Department.

One of the men followed the noise to the creek. He saw a brush fire. And then he saw what he thought might have been a small white dog in the water. On closer inspection, Hartley said, the man found it was the back of the woman’s head. He summoned help and started a rescue effort.

“From what we understand, she was sitting on the side of the creek just looking at the creek and she dropped something, she reached down to get it and ended up falling into the creek,” Hartley said.

Houston Fire Chief Tom Hood said he thinks she dropped her medication.

Whatever was in the river, as the woman fell in trying to retrieve it, she also flicked the cigarette she’d been smoking into the woods on the other side of the creek, Hartley said.

That’s when the fire started. Hood said the fire grew to be about 50 feet by 200 feet in size but crews knocked it down quickly, with help from the state’s Division of Forestry and the West Lakes Fire Department. According to Forestry, the fire was approximately one-third of an acre when it was put out.

Hartley said emergency responders were initially paged to respond to the fire but that effort was quickly combined with a rescue. West Lakes showed up with rescuers and a backboard who worked alongside Houston rescuers.

“They ended up walking the patient on a backboard . . . probably a good quarter mile hike over very uneven terrain,” Hartley said.

At some point the woman’s son called to report her missing. Houston police and Alaska State Troopers, unaware the responders were in the process of rescuing her, asked for help in the search. Responders quickly put two and two together.

“The medics then informed us they had her in their care and custody and transported her to the hospital,” Officer Charlie Seidl with the Houston Police Department said.

Seidl didn’t release the name of the woman, saying victims names are usually confidential but the complainant — in this case the woman’s son, Mark Donovan — is not. Efforts to reach Donovan failed.

Hartley said a lot of credit should go to the man who was working on the benches and ended up finding the woman. He stayed on scene with rescuers and fire crews until she was safely loaded into an ambulance. She was treated for exposure to the cold water, Hartley said.

“He definitely deserves a lot of credit, literally, I believe, for saving that woman’s life,” Hartley said.

Hood agreed, saying the spot where she was found and the nature of her exposure injuries it was unlikely she would have been found until it was too late.

“If she wouldn’t have stopped and had a cigarette she probably would have died out there because we would have never found her,” Hood said.

The day was an unusually busy one for the department, Hartley and Hood said, starting with a fire at about 2 a.m. in Caswell Lakes in which a home was destroyed. The next major call came at about 4:30 p.m. — a fuel tank was on fire at Parks Highway and Big Lake Road.

“It was a 10,000-gallon fuel tank that Fisher’s Fuel was having a gentleman cut up,” Hood said. A piece of hot metal dropped into fuel that the man didn’t know was still in the tank. “It sent up about a 30-foot plume of black smoke and flames shooting out the side.”

Crews sprayed foam on the blaze and got it knocked down quickly. Those things happen sometimes, he said, and it wasn’t terribly excited. Well, at least, not as exciting as the rescue.

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