Little Rice home destroyed by fire

Firefighters from 10 different towns and the City of Tomahawk fought what was literally an uphill battle Monday as they worked to extinguish a house fire on County Highway Y in the town of Little Rice.

Little Rice Fire Chief Larry Mathein said the couple living in there were home at the time and able to escape the flames. 

“Reports were the flames were showing from the street,” he told The Lakeland Times. “I was the first to arrive at the scene. Within five or six minutes of dispatch we determined we had a fully engulfed structure fire which was two levels.”

Mathein said there was a full basement and garage under the upper level living area.

“Access to the dwelling was extremely difficult,” he said. “It was built up on a hill and has a driveway that was virtually impossible to drive fire trucks up. So, we had to stretch hoses from the road about 150 to 200 feet to the building up the hill.”

Mathein said with the initial automatic aid his department received, “we were able to initiate some pretty aggressive attack” and the Mutual Aid Box Alarm System (MABAS) was activated. 

The MABAS activation got more firefighters and equipment from Minocqua, Woodruff, Lake Tomahawk, Prentice, Crescent, Lake Tomahawk, Pelican Lake, Hazelhurst and Russell to the scene along with the Little Rice Canteen. 

“That was done primarily because of the location of this and the difficulty getting up and down from the house was going to be extremely taxing on people,” Mathein said. “And we were gonna need water because it was just really going to be an extinguishment. We weren’t going to be able to save a lot right from the get-go.”

He said the reason for that was because the homeowners were there and discovered the fire “when one of the walls erupted in flames and blocked their primary exit out of the house.”

“They’re an elderly couple and able to escape through a secondary exit through patio doors,” Mathein said. “The male did suffer some minor abrasions and burns and the female had some minor abrasions. They were treated at the scene by ambulance personnel with (Oneida County) Med 4 and were not transported.”

He said the couple had to “get out so fast” they weren’t able to grab a phone or clothing and escaped from the house with no shoes on.

“They had on just what they were wearing lounging around in their house,” Mathein said. “It developed that fast.”

The couple had two dogs. One made it out alive while the other perished in the blaze. 

Mathein said the flames were knocked down in “fairly short order” but firefighters remained at the scene for several hours, working to extinguish hot spots with the aid of an excavator. 

The cause of the fire hasn’t been determined. 

“My suspicion is it had probably been burning for quite some time in the living quarters and broke through,” Mathein said. “We had some familiarity with that house because of previous ambulance calls but it’s hard to say what they may have had stored in various parts of the house.”

At one point, it was reported by the owner of the house that there were “thousands of rounds of ammunition” inside and Mathein said there were some weapons found in the small part of the house that didn’t burn and there was ammunition that “cooked off” in the blaze even before most of the firefighters arrived. 

“The reality is the loose ammunition, or boxed ammunition, isn’t really a hazard unless it’s chambered,” he said. “You know, it’s like everyone has propane tanks for their grills. They had a bunch of those and some of them were already venting.”

Mathein said while at a fire scene, “you take a note of where those are” and “keep an eye on things.”

“Make sure they’re not impinged with fire,” he said. “The guys pretty quickly realized as they were cutting through one of the walls a cache of some firearms ... they removed them right away just so there was no longer a hazard with those. We’re in the Northwoods. We tend to expect those things are going to be there. You be as cautious as you can but you can’t stop what you’re doing.”

Brian Jopek may be reached via email at [email protected].