HOLYOKE — On Sunday, all that remained of the home at 68 Fairfield Avenue was a mound of burned wood, bricks and rubble.
A fire destroyed the two-story home Saturday night displacing its six residents, including an infant. Issues with nearby fire hydrants prompted Mayor Alex Morse to call for an audit of the city’s hydrants, saying the problem was “extremely concerning.” Holyoke Fire Department Captain Kevin Cavagnac, meanwhile, said the hydrant problem “didn’t hamper” their firefighting efforts.
The whole house is lost, said Cavagnac, who added that the cause of the fire was an improperly disposed cigarette. Everything inside it is also gone, said Janat Langevin, a resident of the house. “Everything we owned. Every single thing we’ve owned,” she said while sitting in her neighbor’s yard on Sunday afternoon. “I didn’t even get my pocketbook.”
The blaze broke out at around 6 p.m. on the home’s front porch, officials said, and flames would soon engulf the entire home, located near Northampton Street in the Fairfield Avenue Historic District. Four adults were in the home at the time, and the fifth was on a walk with the baby, according to Cavagnac.
Langevin said she was in the kitchen when her husband told her they needed to get out of the house, and they went outside. “It just went up like something you’d see in the movie,” she said. “I’ve never seen anything like that.”
Around the same time, Marco Crescentini, who lives directly next door, was watching a movie with his son who noticed the fire next door. Crescentini went to his front lawn and saw his neighbor’s front porch ablaze.
“Then we heard some yelling,” he said. He saw two adults on the second-floor porch shouting for help. The two people were cut off from the stairs by smoke, according to Cavagnac.
Crescentini ran into the garage and got a ladder and propped it against the house so they could escape. “It was definitely adrenaline,” he said. “It was really nothing heroic.”
He added, “It was sad to see it go down. Their personal loss is immense.”
Firefighters battled the blaze for hours as sections of the home collapsed. While the fire burned, it was so hot that you would feel it standing across the street, said Cavagnac. Fairfield Avenue was blocked off for several hours between Nonotuck and Northampton streets as emergency crews worked at the scene. They were still on the scene as of 11 p.m. attempting to fully extinguish the stubborn blaze. A fire engine stayed there overnight as well, said Cavagnac.
Cavagnac hasn’t seen a house fire this severe. “I can’t remember it happening in my career, and I’ve been in the department for 13 years.” Part of the issue was that the fire started on the porch on the outside of the house, and grew quite large before it spread to the home, he said.
By mid-Sunday, investigators from the State Fire Marshall’s office and the Holyoke Fire Department determined the cause was “improper disposal of smoking materials on the front porch,” Cavagnac said. It’s far from an uncommon cause. “I would say 90 percent of our fires recently were the same situation — on porches with cigarettes,” Cavagnac said.
Issues with a fire hydrant did not help. One of the two hydrants on the street stopped working, Cavagnac said. They got more water from nearby Northampton Street, and about 1,500 feet away on Lincoln Street, Cavagnac, but the pressure was low and they used pumps to supplement it.
“It didn’t hamper what we were trying to do,” Cavagnac said. “What it ended up doing is it caused more work.” The city’s water department will be looking at the issue, he said.
“Luckily, everyone is safe in this instance, but it’s still unacceptable,” Mayor Alex Morse wrote in a Facebook post on Sunday about issues with the hydrants. “I will also be ordering a complete audit of our hydrants throughout the city to ensure residents know this won’t be an issue in (the) future. No resident or business should have to worry about this happening in the event of a fire,” his post read.
When Langevin was told about the fire hydrant issue, she was shocked. “I couldn’t believe it,” she said. “I said, ‘What do you mean?’”
Neighbors and friends have stepped in to help the family. An online fundraiser has raised more than $15,000 in assistance in less than 24 hours.
Greta Jochem can be reached at gjochem@gazettenet.com.