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It began in the garage of one house and quickly jumped to another house. Both buildings are a complete loss. There is very little left of the two homes involved, but Kootenai County Fire Chief Ron Sampert says firefighters did manage to salvage a few items from both homes. At this point nobody knows what started the fire, but Sampert says his crews did a pretty good job at stopping the fire where they did, considering the circumstances. "Well, we were eating breakfast out on the deck and we heard the sirens go, and we just sort of scanned the river and saw the black smoke. When I got here, I went into the yard yelling to make sure nobody was in the house, and nobody was in the house at the time.
Home owner, Don Smith, had left about 45 minutes earlier. When he arrived back home there was little he could do. In fact all he could do was watch as crews tried to stop the fire from spreading. "Well we were a little short on man power, we rely a lot on volunteers and during the day you can't get them, they're all working. There were a few trucks that did show up, but they didn't have the big hoses, and stuff, and they did the best they could. But a lack of manpower wasn't their only problem. "Well, quite frankly, the houses are too close together, that's where the problem lies. Chief Ron Sampert says crews had no room to fight the fire. "No defensible area in between, there's no fire walls, between the structures, there's not more than probably 15, 20 feet between the structures.
On the back side, more problems. We were surprised it took so long for the water boat to get there, we were there for quite a while before anybody came so that surprised me. It looked like they could save the white house, when we saw it first, and it took a long time for the fire boat to get there. The cause is still under investigation, but one neighbor did report a popping noise in the garage shortly before the fire started.
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