August 21, 2009

Fire strikes again
Occupants in one home of double blaze narrowly escape

By Rodger Nichols
The Chronicle

     Fire destroyed two homes at 401 and 405 West 12th Street in The Dalles Thursday night.
     “I’ve never really had two house fires going when we arrived, and here we’ve had them two weeks apart,” said Mid-Columbia Fire & Rescue Chief Bob Palmer.
     “You have situations where you have a fire trying to extend, but to literally arrive with two houses going, I can’t think in all my years of being here of that happening.”
     A previous fire Aug. 3 destroyed two homes on the east side of town. That fire started in a house at 2410 E. 13th St. owned by the Dexter Welch family. It then spread to a rental occupied by Chuck Parsons and two other people at 1408 Thompson St.
     Names of the owners in Thursday night’s fires were not immediately available, but Palmer said that the owners of the house at 405 W. 12th barely escaped in time.
     He said the call came into the station at about 11:45 Thursday. Palmer said that in talking to the couple, they went to go out the door and the fire came in on them. “They turned and came out a window just as the ambulance arrived and helped them out,” he said.
     According to Palmer, the woman was admitted to Mid-Columbia Medical Center. He said all the residents in the house at 401 W. 12th got out safely.
Neighboring departments were called out.
     “We had Dallesport here; Westside was manning our station, we had Pine Grove here, we had Dufur ambulance here, we had Wishram, so we had a significant amount of people and apparatus,” Palmer said.
     The fire at 401 was particularly difficult to fight due to a metal roof that wouldn’t burn off, he added. City of The Dalles Public Works brought in a tractor with a bucket arm to tear the roof off.
     Both houses were considered a total loss, Palmer said. The last engine left the scene at 8 a.m. Friday.
     No cause for the fire has yet been determined.
     There was some secondary damage from the quantities of water poured on the fire, which washed about a foot of sediment down into a neighbor’s back yard.
“Once they told us that was happening, Public Works sandbagged it, put in a trash pump and pumped it out to the road,” Palmer said.
     A house at 409 W. 12, no more than 20 feet away, was undamaged, though leaves on the neighbor’s tree were thoroughly scorched.
     With firefighters on the scene all night a planned “fill the boot” campaign Friday for the Muscular Dystrophy Association has postponed until Sept. 4.