-By Bob Wade, Night Team Leader/Supervisor–ARC of SE Wisconsin–Milwaukee, WI. 

Wednesday, Sept 12, 2007  

It’s a little after 6pm, Wednesday evening. I am headed up to the attic for my daily workout, police scanner and two cell phones in hand.  I’m on duty again.

The scanner crackles to life before I hit the bottom step to the attic.

“Battalion 1. Respond to the structure fire in the 2000 block of S 27th street! This was called in by the Milwaukee Police Department.” 

A confirmed fire! “Fill out the assignment!!!” 

I run back to my bedroom, change into my gear and I’m out the door. The duty worker calls me two seconds after I start the engine to the van.

I know that Teresa and Pauli are unavailable for calls until after 8pm, so it’s just going to be Kayti and myself at this one.

As I arrive at the scene, a police officer tells me that the occupants are in the alleyway behind the house and points me in that direction.  I drive over to S.27th Street and pull into the alley, then turn right…A dead-end!  It doesn’t go all of the way through here.

I carefully turn around and get back out on to S.27th St and try it a little further south this time.

I pull up and stop at the line of police tape already cordoning off the scene at the fire.  I had heard a call for the arson investigator on my way there…”Fire of suspicious origin.”  It was already being designated as a crime scene.

The house is still burning.  I hear the sounds of breaking glass and the hard hits from the firefighter’s axes.  Everyone in the alley is just standing there with their mouths wide open, with the looks of shock and awe on their faces, their eyes firmly fixated upon the scene before them.

I duck underneath the police tape and walk up to one of the two police officers who were guarding the perimeter of the area.  No civilians allowed in or out.

The two families who lived in this duplex are standing together with their backs up against the opposing garages in the alleyway, just watching their home burn.  A couple of the women are crying. Five members from the lower…the same number from the upper.

A police officer points to one of the men and states that he speaks English.  I start my interview with him.  He rents the upper with his wife and three kids, no renter’s insurance.

The fire started on the 1st floor of the 2 1/2-story duplex. That’s where the owner lives. 

People are trying to breach the police line and the officers start yelling at them.  “Stay out! Get back!”  Not even relatives of the family members are allowed to get near them.  I imagine they don’t want this crime scene contaminated with outsiders.

I notice that some of the family members from the upper don’t have shoes or socks on. I walk over to the van to get some blankets and clothing items for them.

When I get back with the supplies, I see a young girl crying and shaking. Her father has her cradled in his arms.  She’s going into convulsions.

“Calm down….Breath…Relax….You’re going to be alright,” the father states to his daughter.  They lie her down on one of the blankets I had given them, cover her up with the other one, and she goes into a full seizure…but it’s not a violent one.  Her Dad is lying over her, holding her, and you can see a look of fear in the young girl’s eyes.

The police officers call for help on their radios.  “We need paramedics back here!”  They come around with their gear and start to check the young girl out. 

One of the paramedics stands up, walks over to me, and quietly asks, “Do you have any medical gloves? We forgot ours.” 

“Yes…I’ll get them.”  I run back to the van and retrieve those.  “I never thought we’d need these until right now,” I thought to myself.

“Does she have a history of seizures?” one of the paramedics asks the father. 

“Yes,” he replies. 

“Any other known health issues?” asks the paramedic.

“No, just the seizures,” the girl’s father responds.

The paramedics place her on oxygen and hook her up to an I.V.    It doesn’t take long and she’s stable and calm once again.

They lift her up on to a gurney and place her in the back of the med unit and take her to the hospital.

My teammate Kayti is there by this time and after giving her a quick briefing on the situation, I ask her to start the interview with the 2nd family once it appears that they’ve calmed down a little bit.  I can tell that this has rattled everyone’s nerves back there in the alleyway, including my own, but we’re in no hurry there.

The young girl’s mother appears to be losing it at this point and one of the paramedics approaches her and tells her that her daughter is going to be just fine.  “She’s going to be OK,” he says to her with a demeanor of firm confidence.

The Dad asks if he can walk up to his house to get some chairs so some of them can sit down.

“No…It’s not safe yet,” an officer replies. “There’s falling glass and wood over there and the fire isn’t out yet.”

I tell them that I have some folding chairs in my van and go over and get those.

After that, I introduce Kayti to the family from the lower unit and explain to them how she will take down some information from them. 

I tell Kayti that I’m going to head up to the front of the house and speak with the Battalion Commander.  We need to determine the degree of damage to the house and whether or not they’ll be allowed to stay there. It’s hard to tell from the back of the house.

As I pass in-between the two houses, I see that every single window is busted out on the one side.  The siding from the house to the south of the fire is all melted.  The flames tried to start that house on fire as well.

A police officer approaches me and asks, “Can I help you?”  I tell him that I’m assessing the damage to the house to determine whether or not they’ll be able to stay there.  He tells me that the families are in the back and I tell him that I just came from there.  I guess he thought I had just shown up.

The Battalion Commander is busy, and I can tell from what I’m seeing that there’s no way these families are going to be able to stay in this house tonight, or any night in the near future, for that matter.

I walk back to the alleyway and tell Kayti that it’s time to discuss the shelter issue with the families.  They both tell us that they’re unsure about that at this point.  I explain all of their options to them, and they say that they’ll let me know.

We offer the emergency spending money option and both families accept.  Kayti and I head back to the van and get those authorized, and then issue them.

We’re about 90 minutes into this response call and its “wait-and-see” mode by this time. 

Kayti and I stand together within the perimeter of the crime scene and quietly discuss what’s going on there, talk about what’s left to do and how we’re going to do it, as we keep the families next to us within our sight, to make sure they’re OK.

The arson investigator shows up–crew cut hair, jeans, and an untucked striped t-shirt.  He’s the same guy from that big fire on Port Rd on Saturday night.  He has a gun on his belt, and the right side of his shirt is tucked up above it so everyone knows that he means business.

He walks up to me and thanks us for coming out, then turns towards the family members next to us and starts asking them questions.

“Who lives on the first floor here?”  Everyone points to the Dad.

“There’s a burned chair in the living room. Where was that before the fire started?”  They start to answer his questions.  I’m trying to listen in while pretending not to, not sure if this is any of my business to be hearing.

When the arson investigator is done questioning the family in the lower, he turns to the family from the upper.  “Do you speak English?” he asks the other father.  He says, “No comprende.”

“No way!” I think to myself as I’m nudging Kayti. “Check this out” I whisper to her.  “His English was just fine when I interviewed him and now he’s playing like he doesn’t understand English to the arson investigator.”

I think about it for a second then realize, “What would I do if I were in his shoes?”  His landlord and the owner of the house he lives in are standing right there next to him.  Would you say anything negative about the man who controls whether you continue to live there or not, especially in a situation like this?  You’d think the arson investigator would’ve separated the two families so they couldn’t hear each other’s answers–at the very least.

The homeowner starts translating for his tenant, and by the end of the interview, the tenant is speaking all English again, and is speaking directly to the detective.

Once the detective is done with his questioning the police officers allow the family members back in to their home to retrieve their valuables.

“I just want to warn you, there’s water in the basement, and it’s completely filled up,” the officer tells the families.

The 13-yr old boy from the lower comes back to us about 10 minutes later, with only his skateboard in hand.  He tells us that his electric guitar is completely burned up, and that he’s sure glad that his board is OK.

“My sister saw the flames and she just froze when the fire started” he tells us.

I told him that his father has insurance and that I was sure that he’d be getting a brand new guitar to replace his burned up one and, and to try not to worry too much about it.

He seemed to be in pretty good spirits so I asked him show us a few of his skateboard tricks, which he does.

Back in the alleyway, the last two remaining police officers announced that they were leaving so I decided it was time to make our last attempt to get the two families to make a solid decision on where they wanted to stay for the night.

Kayti and I walked up to the back of the house and I told everyone that we needed to get going and asked them if they had decided on where they were going to stay. 

The homeowner, and father from the lower, thanked us for everything that we had done for them, and said they would all be staying with family members nearby.

I gave them our Red Cross fire pamphlet and asked them to give us a call if they had any problems or questions in the coming days.

We jumped back into our vehicles and headed off.  I drove over to the Red Cross Chapter and wrote up my incident report there, then placed all of the paper work into the mailbox. 

I called the duty worker and gave her my final report, then called Teresa up on her personal cell phone and told her all about what she had missed.

It wasn’t until yesterday afternoon, while I was at work, that I found out what really happened to start this fire.

The 17-yr old girl, who had the seizure in the alley, was the one who had accidentally set the fire.  She was goofing around with the candle and a marshmallow in her bedroom.  The candle tipped over on to the bed, setting the bedspread on fire, then she panicked and flicked the burning marshmallow out the bedroom door, into the living room and on to a sofa chair, next to the curtains…and the rest is history.

No one got hurt, this girl is going to be just fine, and that’s all that really matters at times like these, in the long run.

On Thursday afternoon, Steve Stein, the DAT program coordinator, (with 25 yrs of DAT experience under his belt) sent me an email thanking me for my service to the Red Cross and I wrote back to him about this marshmallow fire.  Here was his email response…

“Wow!  Add another entry to your list of “Strange but True Happenings I Happened across While on DAT Responses”.

I guess kids, candles and marshmallows don’t do well together all at the same time in the same room.  Honestly, I have heard of bacon grease catching fire while cooking and being tossed into a waste basket and burning down a duplex; I have heard of people living in a vacant apartment building using the wood floor as a fireplace to keep warm and burning down the whole building and I have heard of a home heating oil company truck filling a basement with furnace oil because they pumped into the wrong entry pipe which did not connect to a tank but was open at the end but I have never heard of a candle/marshmallow/flick across the room type fire.  One for the record books.  Have a good week! …Steve

Filed under: Disaster Response