Neighbors took fast action against fire

Jana Mathia, Whitman County Gazette | Sep 17, 20200

COLFAX—Joann Rizzi knows exactly what time she made the call. Just before making the call, she had been outside her home on West Street. She heard a popping sound and saw sparks shooting from a power pole, then there was a weird smell life fireworks, she said.

Then she saw the fire and called 911 at 10:38 a.m. By the time she hung up with 911, the fire was 15 feet from a garage. Rizzi was watching her grandchildren and called to tell her daughter Richelle Cline she and the children were moving to another location.

Cline called her co-worker, Dave Hefling, telling him there was a fire next to her mom’s house. Hefling, wh o lives in Spokane, said when he arrived there was one fire truck, but within five minutes the fire had spread so much the truck had to move to get ahead of it. Hefling, armed with Rizzi’s hose and nozzle, set to work spraying down garages to keep them from catching. He used a ladder set up by Rizzi’s husband to access the roof and that was his station for the next several hours.

“Basically, I just kept the flames at bay,” he said.

Rizzi was not the only person who had been outside to see the the sparks fly from the power pole. On the east side of town, Chrystal O’Hara was outside with her husband and 16-year-old son when they heard a sound like fireworks going off and saw flames erupt on the west hill.

“We just stood here in awe,” she recalled. “It was spreading so fast.”

She called 911. They could see the fire starting to burn a house. O’Hara, who was still in her pajamas, put on her boots and t-shirt and told her husband they needed to save those houses. Her husband and son, Albert Starrett and Luka Garcia, put on their shoes and they drove to West Street.

“I knew we needed to go and help,” O’Hara said. “We didn’t even think twice about it.”

“I don’t know if the vehicle had stopped moving before we jumped out,” said O’Hara.

They went from house to house, alerting people to the danger, asking where their hoses were and getting the water spraying.

“It’s kind of weird to think about everywhere I was running around,” O’Hara said.

Rizzi recalls seeing O’Hara climbing a rocky retaining wall, hose in hand, to get where she could spray things down more. She joined Hefling on the Rizzi’s roof and focused on the lower house garages to keep the from spreading down.

“I don’t remember how long I was up there,” said Hefling. He and O’Hara kept spraying without breaks for food and bathroom until they were sure the danger had passed. Hefling said his biggest fear was they would think the fire was out, stopping fighting, and it would flare up again and it would all be for nothing.

The set up of the west hill, its houses and streets were a complication to fighting the fire. Assistant Fire Chief Tim Tingley said he can’t put a full-size engine on West Street and the trucks had to access that area by Cromwell. As a mail carrier, O’Hara is familiar to the configuration of the area and its access points. She is also familiar with the people and said she knew of older couples who wouldn’t be able to fight the fire without help.

Rizzi said she was told that had the garages Hefling and O’Hara been spraying caught fire the whole street would have been endangered.

“They saved this whole area, I think,” said Rizzi.

When O’Hara came down from the roof, she went to another house. She recalled looking at her watch at 12:40 p.m. Starrett was still on a roof. Garcia was also still going working to save homes. About half an hour later, they were another home, putting out fire. O’Hara said she gets pretty emotional thinking about how her son jumped in and helped people.

O’Hara returned home about 5 p.m. to her two younger children who had been with grandma. Starrett and Garcia went to get water and cheeseburger for the firefighters. When Zip’s learned what the 40 cheeseburgers were for, they handed Starrett a receipt saying he owed nothing, comping the entire purchase.

When Hefling got down from the roof, he was called into work as a maintenance man at the hospital to work on HVAC and filters due to the smoke from the fires that was effecting the building.

“Some amazing people,” said Rizzi of the pair that appeared on her roof to help save them. “They jumped in where needed.”

“There were a lot of people (spraying down structures and vegetation,” said Tingley. The spraying by citizens did possible knock down flames, yet it was risky.

“It did help in this particular case,” he said, but was quick recall situations where people have died trying to fight fires endangering their homes.

During the fire, Tingley—who was incident commander for that fire—did not stop the citizens fighting the fire on West Street so long as no one tried to climb the hill side. That would have been too dangerous without protective gear, he said. Due to the narrowness of the street, there was also the concern about traffic entanglement if the residents did have to evacuate quickly. While he was cautious about endorsing the actions of the citizens that day because of the risks, he did admit he had expected to lose a lot more houses than they did.