HUNTINGTON – Investigators believe older construction helped fuel a deadly fire Friday morning at 2688 Collis Ave.
Authorities identified the victim as Deanna O’Brian, 61, according to Huntington Police Det. Chris Sperry.
Emergency dispatchers received word of the fire at 1:43 a.m. The house was divided into three residences. O'Brian lived in one of two upstairs apartments.
Huntington Firefighter Shane Masters was one of the first firefighters on scene.
“It was total chaos,” he said. “It was very destructive. Flames were out of just about every window. It was something the normal person doesn’t see.”
The owner was not present at the time, but his son and six-year-old granddaughter escaped from the first floor. The son – Thomas May, 31 – said the woman’s screams for help woke him. She never made it out of the second-floor.
“You could instantly tell something was wrong with the way she was yelling,” he said. “There was flames and smoke everywhere coming out the top portion of the house. Within minutes it was down in this downstairs, front bedroom where the floors were falling and stuff and the porch had caught fire.”
No one was in the second upstairs residence Friday morning. Huntington Fire Marshal David Bias and May said that tenant was in the process of moving out.
The exact cause remains under investigation. Bias estimated the house was built in the 1920s or 1930s. The older, balloon-frame construction can cause an accidental fire to rapidly spread, he said. The balloon-frame design was the choice of many builders during its era. It consisted of using long pieces of wood, sometimes 16 to 20 feet, to build a home vertically.
“That leads to spreading the fire very quickly, especially in a vertical manner straight to the roof and that is what we have,” Bias said. “It is a straight channel from the basement to the attic. There is no fire breaks, fire stops or anything like that in it.”
Investigators believe the fire started in the front, lower portion of the house. Bias said newer construction includes a platform approximately every 8 to 10 feet. Builders use the platform to form the next floor. Bias said the design also stops the vertical spread of a fire.
“When you put a two-by-four on end and you set it on fire at the bottom, it will burn much more rapidly than if you set the end of it on fire and it was laying down,” he said.
May described the woman as quiet. He would occasionally see her when she would walk out to smoke a cigarette on the front porch. The next-door neighbor gave a similar description.
“She was very nice, well-mannered,” May said.
Bias said the home’s front entrance would have been the woman’s best escape route, but he said fire engulfed that passage way. Her only other choice was to escape out a window or through a back door that led to the roof. However, no stairs connected the back door to the ground level.
The size of the blaze forced firefighters to use a ladder truck to extinguish the flames. The fire caused much of the roof to collapse.
“Several of the firefighters remarked about how much fire they actually had,” Bias said. “The whole front was on fire. They couldn’t even really tell what size or what type of house it was. All you could see was flames.”
May said Friday’s blaze was the second fire at the home in about eight years. He said the earlier fire was electrical in nature. He said the house was recently remodeled and in good shape.
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