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Chris Villarreal stood in the driveway of the house he’d lived in for 10 years and surveyed the damage as about a dozen firefighters sawed and hacked at the roof, hours after a fire forced the occupants into the street.
“It looks pretty bad,” Villarreal said. “I lost everything.”
One of six residents in the Montavilla neighborhood house on Southeast Morrison Street between 82nd and 84th avenues, Villarreal said he expected the American Red Cross would help find him shelter for the night.
Soon after dispatchers got the call about the fire around 11 a.m., they learned that a woman was trapped in the basement with a dog. A neighbor and a resident had already tried to rescue her before firefighters arrived, but they had to turn back because of the heavy smoke and high heat, Portland Fire & Rescue spokesperson Rick Graves said in a statement.
After firefighters arrived, a four-person crew was assigned to find and rescue the woman and anyone else inside the house, while two firefighters doused the flames with water. The stairs to the basement were outside the house and were surrounded by flames, said firefighter Giancarlo Scrobogna, 36, a member of the four-person crew tasked with finding the woman.
While crews pumped water onto the flames, Scrobogna searched for stairs to the basement inside the house. Finding none, he went back outside, and found that the flames had been beaten back. A lieutenant stood at the top of the stairs coordinating the team while two firefighters looked for the woman in the basement.
The firefighters in the basement found the bathroom with the woman and dog, and one of the rescuers went inside the bathroom and closed the door to talk to her.
Firefighters had originally planned to bring her an oxygen tank to get her out of the house, but then asked the woman if perhaps she wanted to “just go for this,” given the smoke was not so severe as to make a quick exit impossible. She agreed, and the firefighters led her and the dog she was holding in her arms out to the stairs, where Scrobogna was waiting.
“Please get me out of here,” she said, Scrobogna recalled. He led her up to the lieutenant waiting at the top of the stairs, then went inside the basement to search for anyone else who might need to be rescued.
The woman, who hasn’t been named, was taken to a hospital, as was the occupant who had initially gone inside the house to try to rescue the woman.
The fire was put out within about 10 minutes of the woman’s rescue, Graves said.
Sofia Rangel said she lived in the house with her 17-year-old daughter, 10-year-old son, husband and mother. Rangel’s mother was in the house at the time of the fire, Rangel said. A neighbor went into the house and led her out, she said.
Standing on the front lawn of the house, Rangel’s daughter, Brenda Hernandez Rangel, cried. The Leodis V. McDaniel High School student was in school when her mother called and said the house was on fire. After she came home, Hernandez Rangel learned that her 6-year-old cat, Luna, had died. Hernandez Rangel said she had lived her entire life in the house, where the garage had been converted into her bedroom.
According to her GoFundMe page, Hernandez Rangel has been trying to raise money to study abroad in Italy.
“I am very grateful for this opportunity and it would be a dream come true,” she wrote earlier this year. “However, I live in a low-income household, and paying for my education has always been a struggle.”
Firefighters hacked a massive hole in the garage door and flipped Hernandez Rangel’s bed, which ended up upside down at an angle on the driveway. Hernandez Rangel said was heartened to see that her things seemed, for the most part, to be undamaged, but she teared up when talking about her cat.
The source and cause of the fire is still unclear.
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