Mom, Teen Son Save Family of 7 In Today's Concord Fire

Quick thinking on the part of a mother and her eldest son helped save a family of seven this morning as they escaped a two-alarm fire tearing through their Concord home, a Contra Costa County Fire Protection District spokesman said.

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The fire was reported around 6:30 a.m. on St. Phillip Court, a cul-de-sac off of Willow Pass Road, said Fire Marshal Robert Marshall.

The blaze started somewhere in the garage and spread through a duplex, leaving a total of eight people displaced, including a man who lived alone on the other side of the unit, Marshall said.

[Previous: Fire Damages Concord Duplex This Morning.]

As the mother of the family was getting her school-aged children to class, she started noticing smoke coming in from under the garage door, Marshall said.

At the same time, her teenage son saw the smoke and started hurrying his siblings, who were upstairs, to get down and out of the house. “It was a dual thing,” Marshall said.

“She ran upstairs to get her son and other children as he was saying, ‘There’s smoke up here.’”

Firefighters responded within 10 minutes and found a fire in a garage with a car inside and flames that spread to the two units of the duplex, Marshall said. All eight people received assistance from the American Red Cross, he said.

“The one side where the fire stated is a total loss. The other side is not,” Marshall said. “None of them will be able to live there for a while though because it burned a good portion of the roof.”

Marshall said fire inspectors are confident that the fire was not suspicious in nature and said it appears that there was an electrical system at the fire’s point of origin.

“There were a couple of different possible ignition sources,” Marshall said. “So, we won’t go that so far as to say that’s what caused the fire...but we know there was an electrical source in the area of origin.”

The blaze caused an estimated $350,000 in damage, Marshall said.

--Bay City News

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