Firefighters were able to save a cat and two dogs from a house fire Tuesday evening southeast of Bayfield, but the old, dilapidated house is a total loss.
The fire was reported shortly after 5 p.m. in the 4000 block of County Road 523, a north-south road east of Buck Highway (County Road 521).
By the time firefighters arrived, the home was about 70% involved in flames, said Bruce Evans, chief of the Upper Pine River Fire Protection District.
Firefighters were trying to piece together the story of the fire on Wednesday, he said.
The home is owned by the Southern Ute Indian Tribe and it is “assigned” to somebody, he said, but he was unsure who was supposed to be living there, if anybody.
The house had no power and no water connected to it, he said, but someone had “jumped” the meter and hooked it up to electricity.
“We’re really not sure what was going on in there,” Evans said. “We’re suspicious that there was probably some illegal activity going on in there.”
No one was around the house when firefighters arrived, yet one person was taken to the hospital with burns, he said.
A woman reportedly told firefighters she was raising dogs at the house but not living there.
“Her story was that she had started a fire in the fireplace and it had gotten out of the fireplace and caught some other stuff on fire,” Evans said. “... She said that by the time she noticed the fire had gotten out of the fireplace the whole room was involved in fire.”
The fire department rescued a cat and two dogs, including a Rottweiler. Firefighters resuscitated the cat and it appeared to be doing OK, Evans said. Both of the dogs were unharmed, but one of the dogs and the cat were impounded by the tribe’s animal control division, he said.
The cat may be available for adoption, said another firefighter.
The home was in a rural setting with “a lot of debris and junk” strewed about, as well as small propane tanks and empty chemical containers, Evans said.
What’s more, the home has caught on fire in the past, he said.
“We had a basement fire in that house,” he said. “It’s been structurally damaged significantly to the point where it was very unsafe, so we didn’t go inside of it.”
Firefighters surrounded the home and sprayed it with water to douse the flames.
The tribe gave firefighters permission to demolish the home, so an excavator was used to push the remains into the basement, where they continued to smolder Wednesday.
shane@durangoherald.com
