A Casco woman helped save her family from a fire Tuesday.
Alice Bradeen was planting flowers when she heard the alarm.
She ran inside but said neither she nor her children knew what was going on. After getting her 12-year-old son, 6-year-old daughter and their dog out on the porch, she heard her father-in-law yell for her.
“I went downstairs, and beside of his chair was already orange flames probably like 2 feet high,” Bradeen said. “And he was like, ‘We got to put this out.’ And I said ‘Absolutely not. We need to get out. We can’t put his out now. This is too big.’”
Arnold Bradeen said he had been working downstairs in his electric wheelchair and forgot his oxygen tank was on. He said the oxygen fueled the fire, and he tried to put it out with a towel.
Alice Bradeen said she got her father-in-law to wheel himself out of the house, so she could get her children to safety.
“I grabbed the dog and the kids and threw them in the car and just got out of the driveway,” Bradeen said. “And that was all while trying to talk to the poor person on 911.”
No fire hydrants were nearby, so water had to be trucked in.
The other thing that made fighting the fire so difficult was that all the hoses had to be brought in up the hill of the long, narrow driveway to get at the flames.
Alice Bradeen said she reassured her son, who kept worrying about the fire burning his toys.
She also said her father-in-law was so focused on putting the fire out, he may not have made it out in time had she not been there.