Recovery: What happens after a house fire?

A look at the backyard of a Madison Street residence, which experienced a structural fire on the property on Jan. 5. The fire is currently estimated to have caused damage into the six figures. The city fire department responded and quelled shortly after it was reported. (Steve Van Kooten/Courier Press)

By Tad Beutin
Imagine you’re arriving in Onalaska to go shopping, and you get a phone call from your neighbor, who says your house is on fire.
As a million things are going through your head, you turn around to come home and get stuck behind a slow-moving semi going south on Wisconsin 35.
Then, it gets worse: you start seeing photos of your house in flames all over social media when you’re still an hour away.
That is exactly what happened to Melanie Prew on Jan. 5.
“I was just shaking, and I said, ‘You have to drive,’ because I didn’t know,” she said. “By the time we turned around, and got halfway through La Crosse, it was already on Facebook.”
House fires are not unusual. There’s one every 90 seconds in the United States, which comes to approximately 360,000 a year. That number may be higher this year because of what’s going on in Southern California.
Prew was more than willing to sit down to talk about how she, her father and her daughter are trying to recover from this life-altering event.
For the next six to eight months, which is the estimated time it will take for their house to be repaired, Prew and her family will go through the ups and downs of getting their home and lives back.
Prew and her family will deal with insurance companies, fire investigators, clean-up and remodeling crews, finding a place to live (with virtually nothing) and everything else that entails recovering from a house fire.
The fire
On Jan. 5, at 1:49 p.m., the City of Prairie du Chien Fire Department (PDCFD) Deputy Fire Chief Tim Deluhery, Sr. was traveling south on Dousman Street when he spotted “a lot of smoke off to the east.”
Deluhery, Sr. searched for the source, expecting to find someone burning leaves or brush. When he got near Madison Street, he noticed a backyard shed on fire, with flames already impinging on the east side of the house.
All PDCFD fire officers carry portable radios, and Tim requested that dispatch page out the fire department.
Deluhery, Sr. then went to the front door of the house to get the attention of anyone inside at the time. He was confronted by a large dog that jumped at the door.
Prew’s daughter was home at the time and sleeping in the lower level of the tri-level home. With the dog barking, she woke up and exited the house. Deluhery, Sr. relayed important information on different aspects of the fire and the location of the nearest hydrants to responding units.
PDC Fire arrived seven minutes after being paged out and immediately pulled out hose lines to hook up to hydrants.
There were a few obstacles to overcome when crews first arrived on the scene.
First, we had to breach the fence that surrounded the backyard to get crews with handlines closer to the fire and “start putting wet stuff on the red stuff.”
The second obstacle was high winds, which pushed the fire directly into the house and, at times, south towards a neighbor’s house.
Lastly, it was 10 degrees outside; everywhere we sprayed water, ice immediately formed.
Our third arriving PDCFD fire engine crew (Heath Smith, Ryan Ziegler and Lt. Mike Anthony) came up with the idea of driving into the field behind the house and hitting the main seat of the fire with 750 gallons of water through the top-mounted deck gun.
This kept most of the fire from entering the house and probably saved it from becoming a total loss.
Around the same time, we had a crew up on the roof cutting a large hole to expose the fire that had extended into the attic so the fire could vent out and be easily extinguished from above.
Crews were inside the house preparing for overhaul. They began by removing family pictures off the wall and covering furniture with tarps, knowing that the ceiling would soon cave in from all the water that sprayed into the attic.
Prew expressed her gratitude to the guys that brought the pictures out to her car. The fire was completely extinguished by 3:37 p.m.
The investigation
Investigating the cause and origin point of the fire began with Prew and her dad sitting in my command vehicle, getting warm and answering a number of questions.
After a fire, I always start by asking a set of basic questions: Who insures the house? What is the value of the house? How much do you owe on the house?
Most of the questions I ask may seem personal in nature, but they can help distinguish an accidental fire from a fire that was intentionally set.
We knew the fire began in what Melanie’s dad called his “man cave,” which was a large 16-foot by 16-foot building with windows and a porch that sat approximately 20 feet behind the house. The structure was connected to the house by a series of decks.
When I asked Prew’s father about his “man cave,” he said that he had a space heater running 24 hours a day inside.
He said that at 11:30 a.m., when he was in his room last, there wasn’t anything out of the ordinary, and he kept a large TV, a refrigerator and a few recliners in the room.
A space heater running in the “man cave” prior to the fire raised red flags; however, there are many other possible causes. After talking with the family and reviewing Deluhery, Sr.’s initial observations, I had no suspicion that this fire was anything but accidental.
Prior to the fire department releasing the house back to the owners (under state and local codes, the fire chief has police powers and complete control of the scene during an incident), I accompanied Prew inside the house while retrieved some personal items. The reason I escorted Prew into the house was the ice build-up on the floors and the potential for more ceiling drywall to collapse.
In the late 80s, I went through a house fire, and during my career, I investigated many others, so I’ve seen every different emotion imaginable to a loss like this. I try not to get too personally invested in a family’s loss, but she said something that caught me off guard.
“Now my mom’s plants are all going to die,” she said.
I saw several huge ficus trees and other plants that were too big to remove, and I knew that she was right; they would all die because of the extreme cold that day and the power being out.
For Prew, these plants were memories of her mother and couldn’t be replaced.
The investigation into this fire continued on Jan. 9, when the insurance company and a private investigator came out to take pictures and obtain a fire report from our department.
Assistant Chief Steve Rickleff, Courier Press Editor Steve Van Kooten and I accompanied the investigator to the scene and assisted in the removal of debris.
The area where the fire likely started was a frozen pile of burnt and charred debris, so there wasn’t a way to dig through the debris for useful evidence, like a melted extension cord or the remains of the space heater.
The investigator said that the investigation will just be an “interview of the family.”
The fire department contacted the county and the Salvation Army to help make living arrangements for Prew and her family for a few days, but they had already found a place to stay for the night.
The clean-up
When this story comes out in the Courier Press, it will be one month since Prew and her family experienced their loss.
In that month, their home has been boarded up and electricity restored, and a La Crosse-based cleanup company came in and removed all personal belongings for cleaning and storage during the rebuild.
Prew and her family met with the company that will restore their home, and the company has started the demolition and cleanup of the upper level.
We estimate that the damage to the structure is $200,000 and another $30,000 for contents inside the home.
At the end of this recovery process, we will let everyone know exactly what the fire actually cost. My experience at estimating fire losses is that I am usually low, but in 6-8 months we will find out.
In other business
Besides the fire at the Prew home, your fire department responded to three broken sprinkler systems, which caused significant damage in an apartment building (approximately $50,000 in damages), another in a nursing home (approximately $10,000 in damages) and in an industrial plant (very little damage).
We also responded to two natural gas leaks, one propane leak and recovered one motorcycle that was driven through the ice on the backwaters of the Mississippi River.
The fire department participated in three training days in January, and 47 fire inspections were completed.
Tad Beutin is the fire chief for the city of Prairie du Chien.