Man burned in house fire transported to Seattle

HOUSTON — A man was airlifted to Seattle Thursday night after his garage and cabin burned in a blaze that kept firefighters on scene overnight.

“We took him over to Station 9-1, landed the helicopter and took him right out to the burn unit,” Houston Fire Chief Tom Hood said.

He said the page to respond came in at around 8:30 p.m. He described the buildings that burned as a 20-foot by 30-foot garage with a 12-foot by 20-foot cabin sitting next to it.

A neighbor later told Hood what happened. He said the man had been working on a vehicle in the garage.

“It looked like he was an avid mechanic,” Hood said.

The man had cleaned car parts with gasoline and later when he started working with a torch, the fumes caught fire. Hood said, based on the neighbor’s account, that the man apparently tried to kick the fire out the door of the garage, but the burning gasoline spilled on the floor and on him.

“He tried to save some of his property,” Hood said.

In the process, the man was severely burned.

Hood said that to fight the fire, Houston called out the Willow, West Lakes and Central Mat-Su fire departments. When the fire started spotting in black spruce downhill from the garage, he said, they also called out the state Division of Forestry.

With high temperatures and little precipitation, fire danger in the Valley Friday was listed as “high,” two notches below the highest ranking of “extreme.” And black spruce isn’t something to scoff at. There are grant programs to get rid of the trees, which, of all the species of tree commonly found in Southcentral Alaska, is the most combustible.

“It’s something that makes us pay attention,” Hood said.

Forestry’s water-dropping helicopter was not available at the time, Hood said, but the forestry crew and its fire engine were able to get to those spot fires quickly.

“There was about seven little spots that they found out there,” Hood said.

The fire department crews fought the structure fires defensively, Hood said, meaning that too much of the structures had burned to think about saving them and firefighters stayed outside the buildings with the goal of keeping flames from spreading to the woods or other homes.

As the night wore on, Hood released those mutual-aid departments — the crews from other areas that had responded — but his crews stayed.

“Our staff was there until about 3 o’clock in the morning,” Hood said, saying that’s no small thing for a department whose members all have day jobs. “Most of those guys had to get up and go to work in the morning.”

Contact Andrew Wellner at 352-2270 or

andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com.