Fire burns Valley home

MEADOW LAKES — If you haven’t been to your home off Skyline Circle in awhile, you might want to check and make sure it’s still there.

Battalion Chief James Keel with the West Lakes Fire Department said that even after being on scene for hours fighting a fire that destroyed a home there, he hadn’t made contact with the owners.

“AST was on scene and they couldn’t make contact with any of the individuals either,” he said, using the acronym for Alaska State Troopers.

He said the cause of the fire is listed as suspicious and of indeterminate cause. The fire was reported sometime after 3 a.m., Friday. Skyline is off of Edgewater Drive.

“I believe it was a neighbor that called it in. He didn’t realize it was going until he heard explosions,” Keel said.

By the time Keel arrived on scene the single-story, 30-foot by 40-foot single-family home was fully involved with fire. Probably, he estimated, 99 percent or 100 percent of the building was ablaze.

“That was a defensive fire,” Keel said, using the firefighter term for a fire fought from the outside with the goal of keeping it from spreading, rather than from the inside in an attempt to save the building.

“We mostly concentrated on the exposures — it had a bunch of vehicles and a couple of outbuildings,” he said.

He said crews didn’t have an “all clear” on the building, meaning they were unsure if someone was in there. Within a half hour the fire was knocked down. An hour after that it was safe to send someone in. The first search turned up no one. A subsequent search confirmed that the home was unoccupied when it caught fire.

As for the explosions, Keel said there were three while he was there — two while he was assessing the scene and waiting for fire trucks to arrive and a third after crews were on scene and spraying water.

“We had some small, it looked like oxygen tanks, inside the structure and a couple of small propane tanks in what I think was a workshop area of the structure as well,” he said.

Keel said that explosions didn’t really weigh on his decision to keep people outside, but then his calculation of the situation didn’t actually progress that far.

“It was fully involved when we got there. There was no sense making an interior attack,” he said.

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