NVFD responds to house fire

On Wednesday, Jan. 20 the Nome Volunteer Fire Department responded to a house fire at 603 Seppala. The house is a rental owned by Cheryl and Roger Thompson and is comprised of three separate units.
“They had a tenant inside who had just returned home and had been there a day, and had some issue with a pipe freezing,” said Fire Marshall Jim West Jr. “While she was gone, she had placed an electrical heater in the bathroom to thaw out some water. Then she could smell something burning when she went into the other room. She went into the bathroom where she had placed this heater and found the fire. She ran out, went to the neighbor’s house, which was in the back and told them about it. She returned to the house and called us.”
“She had left and I thought she had a house sitter but she didn’t,” said Cheryl Thompson. “So the place froze. I got the heat back on before she came back but just on low. I didn’t want everything to thaw without someone there because if something came apart I didn’t want the whole place flooding. So, when she came back she put an electric heater in the bathroom and the pipes were all thawed but she left it on and wasn’t paying attention and somehow that caught on fire.”
Thompson said electric heaters can be a real problem, that even Alaska schools have burned down because somebody was thawing pipes and not watching the heater. Jim West Jr. said they haven’t been getting a lot of fires this season but that the electric heaters do cause fires. “Yes, they do cause them,” he said. “I don’t know what happened there, whether it flipped over or what. We don’t know.”
When the fire fighters arrived they found much smoke but no flames. The fire had travelled up between the walls of the structure and into the ceiling and the wall. “The two-story structure was a tongue and groove built,” said West. “Both front and back were tongue and groove. The interior in the middle did have sheet rock. It was stubborn, very stubborn. Old wood. It just kept fustering and mustering. The tin on the roof didn’t get hot enough to melt the snow.”
“We were there a little longer than normal,” said West. “It was deep snow for our guys to get through. We didn’t realize there was a second door in the back. The main attack hose went to the front door. That front room was full of smoke. So they had to work their way around and lost some time there. Once they got in the back it had already spread up inside the ceiling. It just crawled up and creeped around. It was in an odd place. The buildings started to separate,” said West. The house consisted of different parts, said Cheryl Thompson. “Before me somebody built a bedroom in between the house and the place behind it. So it was three different parts.”
The separation of the buildings gave it more oxygen. “We didn’t have any problems with the trucks even though it was negative 8°F. Windchill about 14°F below,” added West. The City’s Public Works brought a scoop of sand which was spread over the icy snow. Utility workers helped by manning the fire hydrants. West reported the ladder truck came in handy. The ladder was extended over the roof of the house and from it, fire fighter Paul Kosto was able to cut a hole in the roof.
The fire crew returned to the hall and cleaned up the equipment and then got a call that it had flamed up again. So they returned to snuff it out for good.
There were 18 volunteers who responded and four EMTs with the ambulance. Three pumper trucks and a support vehicle were on the scene for over four hours.
“It wasn’t horrible inside, it had been insulated,” said Thompson. “But it’s not worth rebuilding. I’ll go in and help her salvage her stuff and then we’ll just board it up and whenever it works out, we’ll tear it down. One of the worst things is it’s one less place for low income people to have to live in. We are in desperate need of affordable housing.”