Fire Guts Apartment Firefighters Battle Blaze For Three Hours

An old church-turned-apartment house just two doors down from Fire Station No. 1 was extensively damaged by a three alarm fire early Saturday.

Forty-three firefighters from Kootenai County, Hayden Lake and Coeur d’Alene spent nearly three hours bringing the building at the corner of Foster and Third under control. Firefighters had not released the cause of the fire late Saturday.

One resident of the gray, two-story building was arrested after going back into her burning home to retrieve guitars. Torianna Powell, 19, was still in the Kootenai County Jail on Saturday afternoon on a charge of obstructing a police officer.

Firefighter Mike Awbrey was taken to the hospital with a shoulder injury and one resident received minor burns on her hands.

Colleen Smith discovered the fire in her apartment bedroom shortly after midnight, as she was preparing to turn in. Several of her friends tried to extinguish the flames, but the old walls were too hot and too engulfed in flames.

“It was so fast,” Smith said, her eyes red-rimmed and swollen from a smoky, sleepless night and from crying.

Murl Lochelt, trapped in the kitchen by the flames, said he grabbed a drawer out of the refrigerator, filled it with water and turned toward a burning hallway wall. The fire was so intense, “I threw the whole thing at the wall and bailed out that window,” he said, pointing to a blackened hole about 10 feet off of the ground.

“Electrical wires were blowing up, sparks were flying everywhere,” added Josh Hurd, another visitor who tried to help stop the flames.

Smith and her housemates ran to the fire department, two doors away, and pounded on the door for help. It took a minute to make it clear the fire was so close, she said.

The light of day made the situation look little better to the nine people who lived in the seven apartments. Fire took out much of the roof and the back of the building.

Cars parked in the tiny gravel space in the back were either scorched or sooty and black. One resident strolled around and around the building, looking for her lost black cat.

On one porch, a punk-rock style Halloween pumpkin sprouted dozens of exacto-knife and razor blades, and was labeled with a warning “Beware of Punkkin.” Inside, a sign on one of the intact walls announced “The maid is off today.”

Lauren D’Antonio, an apartment resident who had been in Spokane all night, was shocked when she returned Saturday and spotted the yellow and black police tape stretched around the building.

Other residents and friends milled around in the late morning, worrying about their rent, their possessions, their next home. “It’s the pictures and the poems,” D’Antonio said. “It’s five years of my soul pouring on paper, in flames.”

She looked wistfully through the open door of the apartment, on the chance that her lines of rhymes were spared.

“I should have grabbed the guitars,” added Lochelt, who was visiting friends here last night. “It ruined everyone’s lives … it makes me want to join a volunteer fire department.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo