Two men have been credited with risking their lives to save a man trapped by flames in his Oyster River cabin.
The fire, reported about 7:40 p.m. Saturday, engulfed a small cabin nestled among old-growth trees on a property on Salmon Point Road in Oyster River.
One of the first people on the scene was Doreen Stobbe, whose house is 15 metres away.
She saw smoke and flames pouring out of the rustic one-room cabin, the home of her 49-year-old son, Shad Stobbe.
“I feared for my son, as he was always a heavy sleeper,” said Stobbe, who operates B&B and Cabin Salmon Point.
“I couldn’t get in because the door was locked, so I was hollering and banging on the windows in the hope of waking him up.”
Her 21-year-old grandson Jake Stobbe, her son’s nephew, eventually broke down the door, but was beaten back by thick smoke and flaming timbers falling from the ceiling.
They went around the back of the cabin, where they found Shad with just his head out of a window that measured about 46 centimetres wide.
“The thought that was going through my head was that I was going to watch my son die before my eyes,” Stobbe said.
With the flames approaching and no other way out, Jake Stobbe and Scott Gibson, 49, a guest at the bed and breakfast, together ripped the window frame from the wall, creating an opening large enough to extricate Shad.
“They grabbed his arms and pulled him out,” Doreen Stobbe said.
Volunteer members of Oyster River Fire Rescue arrived in two trucks eight minutes after the initial call.
Fire Chief Bruce Green credits the swift response to the fact that members had concluded their annual banquet — conducted this year on Zoom — just minutes before the call came in.
Once the 25 firefighters arrived at the fire station, it took them just a few minutes to travel four kilometres to the fire.
An investigation into the cause of the fire begins today, but the suspicion is that it likely started as a chimney fire.
“In the rural areas around here, the majority of people heat with wood,” Green said. “We typically see between 10 to 15 chimney fires a year.”
He recommends people who heat with wood get their chimneys cleaned at least once a year and more often if the fireplace is used year-round. He also stressed the importance of equipping homes with at least one working smoke detector.
“It is a very simple thing that saves lives. In this case, the outcome could have been very different.”
Not only did the fire destroy the structure, but the flames licked at the surrounding mature trees.
“We were fortunate this fire happened in the winter. It would have been a much different story had this taken place in the summer,” Green said.
Shad Stobbe remains in hospital. Surgery was planned for Monday evening to treat deep second-degree burns to his back.
