Dec. 08--Smokey, an aptly-named German shepherd, may have saved his owner's life when fire broke out at their Mayport house Wednesday.
Smokey and his owner, 57-year-old Leigh Orders, were inside the house on North Panuco Avenue when a candle in the living room started a fire sometime before 7 a.m., said spokesman Tom Francis of the Jacksonville Fire and Rescue Department.
Smokey was inside and started yelping, Orders said.
"I heard him crying to tell me something was wrong," said Orders, who was in a bedroom with the door closed. When he opened it, smoke rolled in from the hallway. Orders went to an adjacent bedroom and out a window that was already missing its panes.
He ran around the house and broke a front window to get back in and grab his 7-year-old companion.
"I pulled him out by the back legs," Orders said. "His eyeballs were darn near as big as golf balls. I was pulling him and hugging him and thanking God."
When firefighters arrived, they put out the fire within minutes, Francis said.
But Smokey wasn't faring well, Francis said, so rescuers used a mask designed to give animals oxygen and he started to come around. By late morning he was lumbering around the yard behind Orders.
"I believe he was one step from not being with us," he said of Smokey, who was named for a Burt Reynolds movie and once paired with a Chinese pug named Bandit.
Orders didn't have power to the house and said he is struggling financially.
The Red Cross has provided him with lodging and some cash, he said. Thursday he was at the house gathering what belongings he could save. He has lived in the rental house since September, he said.
Francis said investigators determined the fire was started by a candle burning near the arm of a couch. It isn't a suspicious fire, he said.
