Anchorage firefighters say one person was killed Monday afternoon after a fire swept through a small log cabin in Eagle River. Two other people survived the blaze.
According to an Anchorage Fire Department Facebook post, one of the home’s three occupants escaped and called 911 to report the fire just after 3 p.m. Monday on Roseberry Park Drive. That person told dispatch that one other person was trying to crawl out the window and a third person was trapped inside.
Department spokesperson Megan Peters said Tuesday morning that numerous fire crews responded from Eagle River and across East Anchorage. Photos Peters took at the scene show firefighters working around piled housewares and goods outside the cabin, which had a sublevel beneath the main floor.
“The situation was made even more difficult because of the amount of items strewn about outside the home and also inside the home,” Peters said. “It just made access exceedingly difficult when they're having to hoist their hoses, and also move around the tools and having to create paths just to get to places to put water on the fire. It was very challenging.”
Medics took the person who escaped through the window to a local hospital with injuries. There was no update on the person’s condition Tuesday morning.
Officials have not yet identified the person killed. Peters said the person’s body was found on the cabin’s main level.
A number of pets were also in the home, Peters said, but firefighters didn’t have full word on their condition early Tuesday.
The fire was far from a municipal water line, according to Peters, requiring the use of tanker trucks to help extinguish the flames.
The home continued to smolder for roughly three hours after fire crews arrived, Peters said, as the numerous items inside sporadically reignited.
“It took such a long time to extinguish because, like I said, everything that's in a home turns into fuel to feed a fire,” she said. “And near the end of it, they ended up just putting foam down – every time they would think they knocked it down, it would pop back up somewhere else, just because (of) the sheer amount of fuel that was feeding the fire and how it could just seep around.”
One of the residents told firefighters that the cabin had a single broken smoke detector, Peters said, but that information hasn’t been confirmed by fire crews. Fire investigators were beginning to examine the scene Monday night to determine the fire’s origin and cause.
