The Schwartz home on Hilliard Road after last weekend’s fire, with sheets of plywood where windows used to be.
By Alice C. Waugh
A fire of apparently electrical origin ripped through a garage and heavily damaged the attached home early Sunday morning, requiring help from firefighters from five neighboring towns to douse the flames.
The Schultz family—Katlyn, her husband Kip and son Phineas—of 5 Hilliard Road were awakened at about 4 a.m. by the sound of the electrical panel in the garage arcing and crackling, Katlyn said. “The panel was sparking and smoke was coming out of it, and there was a blazing fire on the back wall, so I grabbed my son and we ran outside,” she said.
Summoned by Kip’s cell phone, emergency personnel quickly arrived. One of them was police officer Ian Spencer. “You couldn’t ask for a better angel to show up,” Katlyn Schwartz said. “And the fire department was incredibly brave. They were willing to risk their lives to save our house.”
When firefighters arrived, “there was a lot of fire coming out of the garage,” said Lincoln Fire Chief Stephen Carter. As they were unwinding hose, a buildup of flammable gases inside the house caused a flash fire to erupt on the first floor and then the second floor, he said. Firefighters couldn’t get into the house from the garage roof, which was made of tar and melting from the heat, so they had to break out the house roof and ceilings to get access, said Carter, adding that the house will have to be condemned. The fire was also fed by the gasoline in a car in the garage.
Mutual-aid firefighters from Concord, Weston, Bedford and Hanscom helped battle the blaze, while others from Wayland and Waltham covered other Lincoln calls during the fire, Carter said.
“They fought as hard as they could, but I think the fire won,” Schultz said.
Friends and others were quick to rally around. A neighbor heard the house’s plate-glass windows exploding and ran over with clothes and shoes for the Schwartzes, who were clad only in pajamas on the cold, rainy night. At school on Tuesday, Phineas’s fifth-grade class made him a jar of rocks, each painted with a word of inspiration. And the family was reunited with their cat, who was outside at the time of the fire but reappeared later on their property and joined the family at a hotel.
“It’s OK—we’re all good,” Schultz said. “We’re lucky we have each other, and that’s what we’re focusing on.”