Neighbors Rescue Woman From Burning Mobile Home
GLENVIEW, Ill. (STMW) - A north suburban woman who fell asleep while smoking suffered burns and smoke inhalation before being rescued by neighbors Friday afternoon from a fire that damaged her mobile home, Pioneer Press is reporting.
A neighbor and his cousin pulled the woman from the home on the first block of South Branch in the Sunset Village mobile home park in Glenview, fire officials said. She had come out but then gone back in to find her cats.
"She's coming out the door and she's screaming, 'Help, my house is on fire.' I tried to get her to leave the house," but she wanted to find the cats, Darren Streiff, 34, said.
While others in the area called the fire department, Streiff and his cousin, Brian Streiff, 26, tried to battle the blaze with a garden hose, but the smoke was too thick to enter, he said.
The woman took the hose, but, "She collapsed. We put everything down, grabbed her and pulled her out of there," Darren Streiff said.
"Right when we pulled her out, glass started exploding," said Brian Streiff. "She was grabbing onto us and boom, the fire came out the window."
The men got the woman across the street into an ambulance that just had pulled up. She was transported to Advocate Lutheran General Hospital in Park Ridge. Witnesses said she suffered burns to her face and singed hair.
It took firefighters about 10 minutes to control the blaze, which started around 3 p.m. in a bedroom and spread through the mobile home's attic.
Glenview Fire Chief Wayne Globerger said firefighters didn't bother trying to hook fire hoses to the undersized hydrants along South Branch. They began pumping water from two fire trucks and laid another line about 800 feet to a hydrant in the Valley Lo subdivision directly south of Sunset Village.
Capital First Realty, manager of the mobile home park, has been obligated to make improvements to the water system — including installing adequate-sized hydrants — under a March 2009 court-ordered agreement with Glenview.
The water improvements have been delayed, however, since Capital First Realty filed bankruptcy in 2010.
