Joan Raymond, at right above, outside her fire-damaged home, and getting a hug from a friend on her neighbor’s heat-blistered porch, below. (Video and photos by John T. Ward. Click to enlarge)
By JOHN T. WARD
October is National Fire Protection Month, one of those designations meant to save lives that many of us find too easy to tune out.
For Joan Raymond of Red Bank, however, a small piece of fire safety equipment meant the difference between being alive and dead Wednesday morning.
“I’m a heavy sleeper,” Raymond said, hours after fire tore through Madison Avenue house. And if not for a talking smoke alarm chriping the word “fire,” Raymond said, mimicking its voice, “I wouldn’t be here.”
“That smoke alarm saved her life,” said Fire Chief Tommy Welsh. “She’s alive because of that thing, no doubt about it.”
A downed power line at left added to the danger of the firefighting effort, says the fire chief. (Photo by John T. Ward. Click to enlarge)
Raymond’s bedroom was above the front porch of the cottage-style home she’s owned since 2007. When the smoke alarm woke her, she said, she threw on a robe and went downstairs, where she saw the porch engulfed in flame.
Heading to the back of the house, she said, she heard a “whoosh” as the front windows blew in and tongues of fire entered the house.
Neighbors later said they had smelled indistinct smoke for several hours. But it wasn’t until next-door neighbor Ann Tardy heard what she said sounded like trash cans being dragged down the driveway that separates her home from Raymond’s that she looked out and saw Raymond’s Mercedes coupe and the front of the house on fire.
Raymond, who has two grown sons, was home alone at the time and escaped unharmed. Her cat, however, died of injuries sustained in the blaze.
Shortly before noon Wednesday, as a dreary rain fell on the charred remains of her house, Raymond sounded pragmatic and almost upbeat.
“It’s funny: I have nothing,” she said. “Nothing. But it’s just stuff.”
Like Welsh, borough fire subcode official John Drucker is convinced that if the smoke alarm hadn’t awakened her, Raymond would have been trapped in the bedroom. The sole window in the room was over the burning porch.
“You made me put that there,” Raymond told Welsh, reminding him that he’d once inspected the house in his role as a borough employee and insisted that the smoke detector be installed in the bedroom.
Welsh and colleagues from the fire department were scheduled to visit the Red Bank Charter School Wednesday afternoon, continuing their monthlong effort to educate children about fire safety and have them carry the message home.
“People give us crap sometimes” because their kids pester them afterward about checking smoke alarm batteries and other safety measures. Welsh said. “I tell them, ‘so change the batteries.’
“It’s not until something this happens that people take it seriously,” he said, surveying Raymond’s nearly destroyed house and the blistered vinyl siding on Tardy’s house. “They have to see it, and smell it.”
The cause of the blaze is under investigation.
