APRIL 2, 2015
ST. PAUL, MINNESOTA
In St. Paul, a motorist stopped to rescue little children
that he saw enter a burning house.
Donnell Gibson was driving to work in St. Paul Wednesday afternoon
when he saw “huge” flames leaping from a fully engulfed house at Western Avenue
and Front Street.
Then he saw something that made his heart sink — three small
children standing near the house next door, which also was starting to burn.
Gibson, 29, pulled a U-turn, jumped out of his car and began
shouting for the children to get away from the house. Instead, they ran inside.
Gibson ran in after them and pulled them out, then ran back
in — over and over again — to rescue the rest of the family — about 10 members
in all.
And he got every one.
“It felt like when you open the oven door,” he said of the
intense heat and danger. “I kept saying, ‘You gotta go, you gotta go, you gotta
go NOW!’ ”
The harrowing rescue came on a day when temperatures in the
metro area soared into the 80s and winds gusted to 40 miles per hour or more,
contributing to fires in other parts of the region and prompting the state fire
marshal to issue fire weather warnings because of the dry conditions. The high
of 84 in Minneapolis broke a 133-year-old record.
St. Paul fire investigators said late Wednesday that a
downed power line in a yard ignited vegetation that was carried by high winds
to the homes at Western and Front. For Gibson, an East Side resident who works
at a nearby recreation center, all that mattered in those terrifying minutes
when the homes were in flames was getting everybody to safety.
Gibson, a Johnson High School graduate who participated in
the city’s Summer EMS Academy in 2009, said he knew he had to do something when
he saw the fire — and the children.
“I had to act,” he said.
Family members were upstairs and downstairs. Kyaw Kyaw Htue,
16, was asleep in the basement when he heard loud noises coming from upstairs.
“It was a stranger who came to warn us. I don’t know what
would have happened if the man didn’t come into our house,” said Htue, a
Humboldt High School student. “But I heard him shouting ‘Get out of the house!’ ”
One house was destroyed. Another one, where Htue’s family
lived, and a garage also were heavily damaged by the flames, said John Mentzos,
a district chief with the St. Paul Fire Department. No one was hurt.
Elsewhere Wednesday afternoon, a fire ripped through four
newly constructed homes in Otsego, northwest of Minneapolis, emergency
dispatchers confirmed.
Crews were still on the scene at 6 p.m. on the 5800 block of
Radford Avenue NE., where high winds spread the flames to several acres of
grassland. Aircraft from the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources helped
battle the fire. It remains unclear whether the homes were occupied at the
time.
The state fire marshal issued fire weather warnings
throughout the state, with red flag warnings in southwest Minnesota.
Various fire warnings are out for parts of central and
southeastern Minnesota until Thursday evening.
In Sauk Rapids, two people are safe after escaping a house
fire driven by strong winds. The St. Cloud Times reports the column of smoke
could be seen from more than a mile away.