Fire demolishes mobile home

A suspicious fire destroyed a vacant mobile home at 3809 S. Geiger Blvd. on Thursday morning, but firefighters were able to knock it down before it spread to the adjacent trailer.

Spokane County Fire District 10 responded at 9:42 a.m. to a call about a fire near the Airway Express Inn, Deputy Chief Rod Heimbigner said.

“I was the first one on the scene, and it was fully involved,” Heimbigner said. “It was pretty close to coming down to the ground already.”

Nobody was injured, he said.

“It was vacant, and it had no power,” he said. “To us, that is pretty suspicious.”

Airway Express employee Dean Schwartz said he was mowing nearby when he saw a man run out of the trailer about 9:30 a.m. Schwartz called and reported what he saw to the front office. He then went in the trailer to investigate.

“When I walked in, I realized the back room was fully engulfed,” Schwartz said. “I wanted to make sure there was nobody in there.”

He ran next door, got a fire extinguisher and returned.

“I tried to put it out, but I got overwhelmed by the smoke, and I backed out,” Schwartz said.

Schwartz said he last saw the man running into a stand of pine trees near an Interstate 90 overpass.

Heimbigner said fire investigators had just arrived at the scene so he wouldn’t speculate about the cause.

“Our concern was the trailer next door,” Heimbigner said. “It got really warm, but it didn’t catch fire. These structures go up very quickly, especially the older ones that are made with wood and not sheet rock.”

The blaze scorched and blew out the window of the nearest mobile home, which also was unoccupied at the time. Firefighters had to force their way into that trailer to search it, Heimbigner said.

Dustin Hebert, 22, and his cousin, Damien Lo, also 22, said they were sleeping in the mobile home two spaces away when a friend called to say a nearby trailer was on fire.

“The flames were really high. It was still kind of standing, but when they hit it with the hose, the whole thing collapsed,” Hebert said.

Heimbigner didn’t know if the burned mobile home had a smoke detector.

“We keep smoke detectors on the rigs,” he said. “If we come out on a medical call and they don’t have any, we’ll give them one.”