Family escapes burning home

A Middle Road family will be forced to start over following a massive fire that destroyed their home Wednesday morning.

According to eyewitness Jake Zakavec, the fire started shortly before 6 a.m., when he received a call that Hayley Matthews’ home was on fire.

Zakavec’s girlfriend — Matthews’ 22-year-old daughter — was with him at the time, having stayed overnight at his house.

The house was engulfed in flames by the time they arrived, shortly after the first fire truck arrived from the Creston Fire Department. 

Hayley Matthews, her 13-year-old daughter and her 10-year-old son made it out of the house uninjured.

Zakavec shared the Matthews’ story of their early morning escape from the home.

“Hayley heard some rustling and got up, thinking it was the kids, and walked into the kitchen, and all of a sudden the whole outside of the house was lit up in orange,” Zakavec said. “So she started yelling for the kids, and the daughter ran up from upstairs. Then they woke the son up and started running out of the house.”

The family had two new litters of puppies and two full-size dogs, and on their way out of the house, the children grabbed the puppies, saving them from the fire. The other dogs also were saved.

None of them, however, grabbed any extra clothing, and her son was only wearing a pair of boxer shorts, so they immediately ran to their car. The only problem was that the keys were still inside the house.

Hayley ran back into the house, which was not yet fully engulfed, and found the keys.

“Right as Hayley was running out of the house with the keys, all of the windows in the kitchen and the big double-glass doors behind her just exploded and flew all at her,” Zakavec said. “She just barely got out.”

When they climbed into the car, the thermostat showed the outside temperature was just 6 degrees.

Zakavec said it was a lucky break for his girlfriend that she was not home at the time of the fire.

Not only had she just been in a car accident two weeks ago and been in and out of the hospital since then, but firefighters also said that because of the way one part of the house collapsed, if she had been home in her room, she would have been killed.

It took firefighters roughly four hours to bring the fire under control, largely due to the amount of fuel.

Stored in the Matthews’ basement were six cords of wood and 3,000 pounds of pellets. Zakavec said firefighters used 16,000 gallons of firefighting foam battling the fire.

When he drove to a gas station at the intersection of Montana 206 and Montana 35, roughly 3 miles away, Zakavec said he could still see the fire. Firefighters with the Badrock Fire Department were on scene late into the afternoon controlling hot spots on the site.

Zakavec said the wood and pellets in the basement weren’t the only things that caused an issue during the fire.

“One of the ladies who used to own the house had an old wine crate of ammunition” stored in the garage, Zakavec said. “And so as everybody was going into the house and neighbors were coming by as the house started to catch on fire, everybody heard this ‘pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop.’ You’d just hear all these bangs and explosions because all the ammunition went up in flames.”

Creston Fire Chief Gary Mahugh said there was no cause yet determined but it was under investigation, but Zakavec said they believed it was electrical.

According to Lou Savik, a volunteer on the disaster action team of the Kalispell branch of the American Red Cross, the organization has been able to provide food and clothing to the family, which lost everything in the fire.

“We can also provide shelter for up to three nights, but the family is staying with someone, so they didn’t need it,” Savik said.