CEDAR CITY — A professor and his wife were temporarily displaced from their Cove subdivision home early Wednesday morning.
Cedar City Fire Department Chief Mike Phillips said emergency crews were dispatched to an address near 2300 W. Meadow St. after a kitchen fire at 8:40 a.m. and arrived 3 minutes later.
The fire started in an upstairs kitchen of a home owned by a Southern Utah University professor of accounting, Battalion Chief Erick Cox said. Crews extinguished the fire quickly, yet the homeowners will be displaced while the smoke clears and the damage is repaired.
“Most home fires start in the kitchen,” Cox said. “The first crews got here real quick. Two minutes later and this could have been a lot worse.”
The fire climbed a wall, melting windows into liquid with heat ranges of up to 1,200 degrees, Cox added, burning through a doorway. Smoke could be seen billowing out the back of the house by neighbors watching the scene from the street.
By 9:30 a.m. the first crews started storing equipment while remaining crews checked the roof and ventilated the house.
Cox said he knew the homeowner, making the call to the incident “a little personal.” The fire also allowed the department to test recently purchased equipment for the first time.
After a fire, crews can often be seen rolling hundreds of pounds of hoses by hand. Cedar City Fire Department recently purchased a Rollnrack Hose Management System that can roll up to 100 feet of hose — then ejects the roll onto a handcart with wheels.
While watching crews put the nearly $7,000 piece of equipment to use for the first time since training, Cox said the tool drastically improves efficiency by removing all air and water from the hoses prior to storage.
“It’s also going to save a lot of backs,” he said. “Packing up is not one of the fun parts of this job.”
Phillips said the cause of the fire is still under investigation and the flames did not successfully make it into the roof of the house due to the quick response time.
“We had 17 firefighters at the scene, with the first crews arriving 3 minutes after the call came in,” he said. “If we were 1 minute later, the fire would have likely reached the roof. Then it would have been off to the races.”
The fire was called in by a neighbor after smoke was seen coming from the window, Phillips said. Nobody was inside the home at the time.
One fire engine, one ladder truck, one brush engine, one heavy rescue apparatus and two command vehicles supported the extinguishment by the Cedar City Fire Department.
Cedar City Police Department and Gold Cross Ambulance provided traffic control and on-scene medical assistance. No injuries were reported by firefighters or residents, Phillips added.
This report is based on statements from court records, police or other responders and may not contain the full scope of findings.
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