Paper carrier, neighbors help stop fire in Lake Stevens

Published 11:17 pm Sunday, March 22, 2009

LAKE STEVENS — If it weren’t for Violet Garcia, a small fire here could have been much bigger.

By alerting neighbors to a fire in a garbage can next to a house, she might have kept the home from going up in flames, neighbors and a fire official said.

Garcia, 25, was delivering newspapers for The Herald about 3 a.m. March 15 when she saw some flames in the 10600 block of 24th Street SE, south of Lake Stevens near the Machias Cutoff.

“I was thinking, that’s very strange,” she said.

She saw that a trash can next to the home was on fire. The flames were starting to catch on the house.

She rang the doorbell six times and knocked on the door, but no one answered. Then she went to the next door neighbor’s house.

She knocked and rang and rang and knocked until someone finally answered the door.

“I was fast asleep but was quickly awakened wondering why anyone would be ringing our doorbell so early or late,” Michelle Thompson said.

Her husband, Jerry, also wondered who it was.

“I told him it was the paper lady and he ran back downstairs basically ready to chew her out if she wanted him to renew our subscription at 3 a.m. She quickly said, ‘Your neighbor’s house is on fire,’” Thompson said.

Thompson’s husband ran outside to look and saw the corner of the house starting to burn.

He told his wife to call 911 while he knocked on another neighbor’s door. That man joined him and together they fought the fire with a garden hose and threw some dirt on it. They got it put out by the time Lake Stevens fire crews arrived.

Batallion chief Bruce Huston said the fire could well have been much worse if Garcia hadn’t come along.

Huston gave her credit for “getting immediate help and being persistent on the doorbell to get that guy down there. People sometimes don’t want to be involved.”

He also gave credit to Jerry Thompson and the other neighbor for fighting the fire, though he warned that there’s an element of danger in doing that.

The woman who lived in the house wasn’t home and was notified later of the fire, he said. Damage was limited to a corner of the house. The cause of the fire isn’t certain — the department didn’t do a follow-up investigation, Huston said.

Garcia said she left when she saw that the fire was under control. The trash can in which the fire started had melted all the way down, she said — “it just looked like a pile of plastic.”

A stay-at-home mom, she’d been on the carrier job for about 1½ months when the incident occurred, she said.

Garcia realizes she may have prevented a disaster.

“I got there I guess just in time,” she said.

Bill Sheets: 425-339-3439, sheets@heraldnet.com.