PORT ANGELES — Smoke and damage from a fire so hot it melted the smoke detectors has left a home on the Lower Elwha reservation uninhabitable.
Janet Francis and her husband are staying with relatives after the 3 p.m. Monday blaze at 152 Mimwheeten Way, said Lt. Troy Tisdale of Clallam County Fire District 2 on Tuesday. Tisdale did not know the husband’s name.
No one was hurt in the fire, ignited by an unattended candle, but Francis didn’t know that her husband was not in the house when she arrived to find smoke and flames pouring from a broken window next to the front door.
She tried to go in after him but was stopped by her neighbor Mitch Boyd, Tisdale said.
“Her husband later arrived at the residence unaware of what was going on,” Tisdale said in his report.
Francis had lit a candle on a table next to a coat rack in the foyer before leaving the house about 30 minutes earlier, Tisdale said.
The fire spread to the floor, walls and ceiling and into the attic. It burned only a small area in one room, but the entire 1,900-square-foot home was damaged by smoke and heat.
The fire burned so hot that it melted appliances, and smoke detectors “melted off the ceiling,” Tisdale said.
A cat was found unharmed in the attached garage.
Twenty firefighters and five vehicles were dispatched to the home to fight the blaze.
Assisting Clallam County Fire District 2 were the Lower Elwha tribal police, the Clallam County Public Utility District and the Lower Elwha Housing Authority.
