Fire, smoke damages Cd'A home
LOREN BENOIT/Press Firefighters respond to a house fire on Pennsylvania Avenue in Coeur d’Alene Tuesday evening. The homeowners were out of the home when they received calls and text messages about a fire that started in their garage. A dog was inside the home at the time, but was rescued by a neighbor. The cause of the fire is under investigation.
LOREN BENOIT/Press Home owner Eren Diaz holds her dog, Derby, after a neighboor rescued the pet from a fire that started in the garage attached to Diaz’s Coeur d’Alene home on Tuesday. No one was injured. The cause of the fire remains under investigation.
No one was injured in a fire that appears to have started Tuesday in the garage of a downtown Coeur d’Alene residence.
Only a small dog named Derby was inside the gray, single-story home around 5:30 p.m. when neighbors said they heard a banging noise and saw flames shooting from the garage.
Justin Munroe, who lives nearby the 921 E. Pennsylvania Ave. home, said he was outside in his backyard when the noise and smoke startled him.
“We heard something that sounded like gunshots or explosions or something,” Munroe said.
He walked through the alley to 10th Street which adjoins the property and saw the house behind a cloak of black smoke.
“All we could see was flames,” Munroe said.
Neighbor Patrick Stedman saw the fire when he was taking out the trash. He called authorities, then ran across the street in his flip-flops, past the burning garage which is built into a hillside with the home attached above it.
“I ran to the side door and yelled,” he said, to make sure no one was inside. He saw Derby, the small brown and gray dog, scooped it up and handed it to another neighbor, then walked around yelling and waiting for a response from inside, but there was none.
Homeowner Raniel Diaz told firefighters he had left the home around 5 p.m. to go to the lake when he started getting calls from friends and neighbors.
“His phone started blowing up,” Craig Etherton, a fire inspector with the Coeur d’Alene Fire Department said.
Etherton said the fire appears to have started in the garage and shot out and toward the eaves of the house scorching the north outside wall.
Firefighters arrived and quickly knocked down the flames and by 6 p.m, they pulled ceiling material to check for soldering debris.
“It was contained to the garage,” Etherton said. “The rest of the house was smoke damaged.
An SUV inside the garage was also damaged, he said. Firefighters remained on scene at 6:30 p.m. and fire inspectors were expected to spend several hours at the residence in an effort to determine the cause of the blaze.
“We’ll start digging into it pretty quick,” he said. “We’ll probably be here a while.”