SAN ANTONIO, Texas – The San Antonio Fire Department has confirmed that fire crews responded to an earlier call about an odor of smoke at a Northwest Side apartment hours before it went up in flames.
The original call at the Chisolm Trace apartments came in around 12 a.m. Tuesday.
Lisa Espinoza told KSAT 12 News that she had placed the call after noticing a smell that told her something was burning inside her third-floor apartment.
She said firefighters arrived, took a look around the building, then shut off an electrical breaker that powered a fan in her bathroom.
Espinoza said she still wasn’t convinced that was the extent of the problem and tried to make fire crews realize that.
“He still insisted it was dust. I said, ‘That’s not accumulated dust. I’m telling you it smells like burning wood,’” she said.
A few hours later, Espinoza said she woke up to even thicker smoke inside her apartment and the sound of her daughter’s panicked voice.
“(She was) yelling, ‘Mom! Mom! Get up! We need to get out. The house is on fire!,” she recalled.
Espinoza, her family and all their neighbors in the building escaped the fire, leaving the warmth of their homes for the cold morning air.
Fire crews arrived at the complex, located in the 10500 block of Huebner Road, for the second time around 4 a.m.
They quickly got to work, trying to knock down flames which had spread into the attic.
“We did have a little bit of difficulty getting the fire out in the attic. It was in the eaves and the flashing,” said SAFD Battalion Chief Mike Mullins. “There was a blower motor in the bathroom that appears to have caught fire in the attic.”
It was the same motor where Espinoza noticed the initial smell of smoke.
She believes the fire may have been smoldering the entire time, and that firefighters could have taken more action the first time around.
Joe Arrington, a public information officer for SAFD, confirmed that firefighters had cut electricity to a heater during the earlier visit.
However, he said there were no notes indicating what other action they took at that time.
While the fire was contained to one apartment, all the others in that section of the building were left with either smoke or water damage.
Espinoza said the fire cost her family all they had.
“My little girls don’t even have shoes. Everything is gone,” she said.
Volunteers with The American Red Cross showed up hours after the fire was out to provide some temporary relief to everyone displaced by the fire.
However, Espinoza said she worries about the future because her family has nowhere else to go.