Woman dies in home explosion

CASWELL — Two fires in two weeks in the same mile of the Parks Highway have left firefighters in the Valley’s northern reaches with the grim task of recovering bodies from the rubble.

The first fire, reported in the early morning hours of Nov. 9, at Mile 87, involved four deaths, though Alaska State Troopers say not all of them died as a result of the fire. The second came at 10:45 a.m., Tuesday when a home, also near Mile 87, exploded and caught fire. A man made it out alive, but Julia Weber, 42, of Talkeetna, did not.

Lance Barve, chief of the Willow Fire Department, was the first person on scene at Tuesday’s blaze. He said he’d just gotten off a plane from Hawaii and his fire captain had just returned his department SUV to him. So when the page went out, he only had the one set of turnout gear. He gave that to his captain.

That’s why Barve ended up shielding his face from the heat with a shovel the explosion had thrown from the home while he did a walk-around to check the building and cut off the power and other utilities.

The winds were strong that day and it was not an easy fire to fight, Barve said.

“We had over 30-foot flame lengths the way the winds were blowing and that was pretty much horizontal,” Barve said.

He said the wind was part of the reason the blaze went from an explosion to a full-blown fire so quickly.

As for the explosion — it was significant.

“The debris field was 50 to 60 feet away from the building,” Barve said. “People that lived a quarter mile away said the concussion was such that they thought there was an accident on the railroad.”

He said the blast was strong enough to break the door frame of a nearby generator shed. When trucks arrived, they immediately began putting water on the fire. Nobody could go inside the building for quite awhile as firefighters worked to knock down the flames.

“It was hot. Nobody was even going near the building,” Barve said. Which was tough, because “from the start we knew we had somebody inside of the building.”

The buildings along the highway in the Caswell area have, for whatever reason, been somewhat prone to fires. Indeed, said Mat-Su Borough Emergency Services Director Dennis Brodigan, it was fires on that stretch of road that drove the effort to implement a fire department there.

“Over an 18-month to two-year period we had four house fires up along the Parks Highway,” he said.

Which is why voters there chose in 2008 to tax themselves and start a fire department. That department began last year and has grown slowly since. There is a small a roster of Caswell firefighters and a couple of trucks.

One of the things he noted about the recent fires, though, was that in both cases the deck was heavily stacked against firefighters. The Nov. 9 fire wasn’t called in until the home — a trailer with plywood additions — was fully engulfed. By the time the first firefighter arrived on scene it was already on the ground.

And then Tuesday, the house exploded and the winds whipped the fire into an inferno.

“No matter how close any fire department was it wouldn’t have helped in either of those cases,” Brodigan said.

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