Fire destroys Willow home

WILLOW — A woman and her 5-year-old son narrowly escaped a fire that ignited in their home Monday morning.

“She was at home with her 5-year-old son making breakfast and her smoke detector started going off and then it quit,” Acting Willow Fire Chief Bill Gamble said. “She didn’t think anything about it.”

He said that the home is at Mile 64.5, Parks Highway off of W. Twitty Road.

Gamble said that as the woman was feeding her son breakfast, she went into the back part of the house, where her teenage daughters usually sleep, to get some batteries. The girls were in Anchorage at the time, which is good because, Gamble said, when she opened up the door to that part of the house, smoke poured out.

Gamble said the woman gathered up her son, her purse and other items she needed and headed out the door. She got the boy in the car and called for help.

“And then she decides that she’s going to go back in and get her husband’s brand new big screen TV,” Gamble said.

When she got inside, the woman was overwhelmed with smoke and quickly left the house a second time.

“She was really fortunate and she knew she was. She told me when she got out that she knew she shouldn’t have gone back in there,” Gamble said.

When firefighters arrived the home — which Gamble said was between 4,000 and 5,000 square feet — was fully involved in fire.

Crews fought it defensively, meaning they didn’t go inside the home or try to save it so much as they made sure it didn’t spread into the woods. They had help with that effort from the state Division of Forestry.

“When we’re working the structure fire they’re out in the woods looking for spot fires,” Gamble said, using a firefighting term for small brush fires sparked by blowing embers. “They didn’t find any. It was raining pretty hard up there.”

Eventually, the home collapsed down into its large cement basement. Gamble said that firefighters had to get a backhoe to come pull the smoldering debris out of the basement so it could be further doused and they could be sure it was out.

“It was a total loss. They had no insurance because it was an unfinished structure. They were building it out of pocket,” Gamble said.

He said the safety message to take out of this one is not to go back into a burning building.

“Ninety percent of the fatalities that we deal with are from people that have left and go back into a burning building,” he said.

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