Shawn Vestal: Be a hero, make sure your smoke detectors work

Imagine it: Your house on fire.

Your children inside.

Just the thought twists a parent’s heart with anxiety. Imagine the emotional inferno Angel Fiorini faced Friday night – during the annual weekend celebration of make-believe terror – when a nightmare came to vivid life.

House on fire. Kids inside.

Fiorini saved her three children from a flaming double-wide in Otis Orchards at around midnight Friday, carrying her two youngest outside and then crawling back into the home to rescue her 7-year-old daughter, Gianna, according to fire officials and family members. She collapsed in the doorway with her older girl, and a man who had been driving by and saw the fire came to her rescue, pulling her away from the fire while his wife called 911.

The two youngest – 3-year-old Vinny and 16-month-old Rosalie – have been released from local hospitals. Fiorini and her older daughter remain at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, in critical condition.

“Her name is what she is – an angel,” said David Fiorini, a relative who flew from Phoenix to Seattle when he heard the news. “When she opened her eyes (at Harborview) I said, ‘There was no way you were going to leave those babies in there, were you?’ and she shook her head and said, ‘Not on your life.’ ”

Melanie Rose, spokeswoman for the Spokane Valley Fire Department, said, “It was heroic, for sure. We were there really quickly, but a large fire burning inside a home … She saved her kids. That’s what she did.”

There was another sobering fact about the fire: There were no working smoke detectors in the home, Rose said. Which was also the case exactly one week earlier, when a 3-year-old child died in a fire in a Hillyard home, where the smoke detector did not have a battery, fire officials said.

And so – as they often do when relaying the facts about the latest tragic house fire – officials have been beating the drum for fire safety and smoke detectors over the past week. If you’ve got them, make sure they’re working. If you don’t, get them – buy and install them yourself, or take advantage of the fact that your fire department will likely give them to you free if you ask. The Spokane and Spokane Valley departments both do – as well as perform home inspections for fire safety on request – and Coeur d’Alene’s department provides them for low-income or elderly residents.

“It can make all the difference,” Rose said.

Most of the time, when people die in a house fire it’s in a house that doesn’t have a working smoke alarm, according to a September 2015 report by the National Fire Protection Association. Three of every five home-fire deaths happened in homes without a smoke detector entirely or without one that works, the association found in analyzing all American fire deaths reported to local fire departments from 2009 to 2013.

The death rate from home fires was more than double in houses without working smoke detectors – 1.18 deaths per 100 fires in homes without working detectors, compared to 0.53 deaths per 100 fires in those with them.

The report noted that most homes now have smoke alarms, but many of us do not make sure they’re working. A quarter of the time when smoke alarms fail, it’s because the batteries are worn out, the report said.

“Progress has been made but more work is needed,” the report said. “The households with smoke alarms that don’t work now outnumber the households with no alarms by a substantial margin.”

The investigation into the fire at the Fiorini home is ongoing, and neither the cause nor many other details are yet known. The children’s father, Aaron, was not home at the time of the fire. The Spokane Valley Fire Department was called at 11:57 p.m. Friday, and had its first engine on the scene by 12:04 a.m., Rose said. The man and woman in the car who stopped asked fire officials not to release their identities to the public.

David Fiorini, who is Aaron Fiorini’s uncle, said Angel awoke during the fire because she was coughing from thick smoke already throughout the house.

A family friend established a GoFundMe account to help the family with expenses, and a fundraiser is planned for Saturday at The Roadhouse in Spokane Valley.

“They have nothing,” David Fiorini said. “Everything’s gone.”

In the meantime, Angel Fiorini is recovering at Harborview with her daughter, surrounded by family and friends. She has serious burns on the upper half of her body, as does her daughter, and both have burning in their lungs from breathing the superheated air in the home, David Fiorini said. He said that both are beginning what is likely to be a monthslong healing process, but “no one’s dying.”

And everyone is well aware that it could have turned out much worse.

“The hero,” he said, “is Angel.”

Shawn Vestal can be reached at (509) 459-5431 or shawnv@spokesman.com. Follow him on Twitter at @vestal13.