Cedar City — A professor and his wife were forced to temporarily evacuate their Cobh Township home early Wednesday morning.
Cedar City Fire Chief Mike Phillips said emergency crews were dispatched to an address near 2300 W. Meadow St. for a kitchen fire at 8:40 a.m. and arrived three minutes later.
Battalion Chief Eric Cox said the fire started in the second-floor kitchen of a home owned by an accounting professor at Southern Utah University. Firefighters quickly put the blaze out, but homeowners will be forced to evacuate until the smoke clears and the damage is repaired.
“Most residential fires start in the kitchen,” Cox said. “The first firefighters arrived quickly. A two-minute delay could have made things much worse.”
Cox added that the fire had traveled up the walls, melting windows into liquid with temperatures of up to 1,200 degrees and spreading to the front door. Neighbors watching from the street could see smoke billowing from the back of the house.
By 9:30 a.m., the first crews had begun packing up their equipment while the remaining crews inspected the roof and ventilated the home.
Cox said the call to the incident was “a little personal” because he knew the homeowner, and the fire also allowed the fire department to test recently purchased equipment for the first time.
After a fire, it's common to see firefighters hand-coiling hundreds of pounds of hose. The Cedar City Fire Department recently purchased the Rollnrack Hose Management System, which can reel up to 100 feet of hose and discharge the roll into a wheeled handcart.
As he watched workers use the roughly $7,000 piece of equipment for the first time since training, Cox said the tool significantly improves efficiency by removing all air and water from the hose before it is stored.
“This will take a lot of strain off my back,” he said. “Packing is not the most fun part of the job.”
Phillips said the cause of the fire is still under investigation and that the quick response meant the flames did not reach the roof of the home.
“There were 17 firefighters on scene and the first team arrived three minutes after the call,” he said. “One minute later and the fire would have reached the roof. That would have meant a fast-tracked effort.”
Phillips said a neighbor called the fire department after seeing smoke coming from a window. No one was inside the home at the time.
The Cedar City Fire Department assisted in fighting the blaze with one fire engine, one ladder truck, one brush engine, one heavy rescue vehicle and two command vehicles.
The Cedar City Police Department and Gold Cross Ambulance provided traffic control and medical assistance at the scene, Phillips said, adding that no injuries were reported by firefighters or residents.
The report is based on court records and statements from police and other responders and may not contain the full scope of the findings.
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