A house fire that erupted Saturday night in a tightly packed Mililani cul-de-sac seriously injured a man in his 60s and sent his neighbors into a frenzy.
“We were watching TV, and we saw red flickering outside, so we opened the window,” Zuri Aki said Sunday morning of the fire that flared up in a one-story, three-bedroom home on Waipono Place around 8:45 p.m. “The back room was on fire, or flames were coming out of the window, so we ran out here. My roommates grabbed the water hose and started shooting water on the house, and then I was pounding on the door.”
Aki said he heard somebody get up and leave from the back door just in time, but that he worried all night whether everyone who lived there survived.
“The fire just spread within maybe two minutes,” he said. “It was real quick.”
Honolulu Fire Department spokesman Capt. Terry Seelig said arriving firefighters saw flames that had engulfed about half of the wooden structure and initiated a “rapid attack” that brought the blaze under control by 9:11 p.m. Seelig said the house is a total loss with damage estimated at $250,000. The cause remains under investigation.
A male occupant in his 60s suffered second-degree burns to his hands, legs and face, according to Emergency Medical Services radio transmissions. He was transported in serious condition to a hospital.
“This side of the house started burning up, the right side of the house in the back, and then it went up the tree,” said neighbor Jessica Helenihi, who lives across the street from the charred home. “My dad and a couple other guys that live in the area, they went and helped the guy that was coming out of the house. They brought him over here and then the Fire Department came. When the Fire Department came, the whole house was already burning.”
Helenihi said another man who lives in the house, reportedly the injured man’s brother, came home from work after his brother had already left for the hospital. Their mother, she said, moved out recently and also was not home when the fire broke out.
“It’s really sad because the guy was working on his house,” Helenihi said. “He was trying to fix everything up because the houses, you know, all the houses around here are really old, so he was just, you know, making it a little bit more livable … fixing the roof and everything.”
It was the second of four fires Saturday and Sunday.
Early Sunday morning, Honolulu firefighters responded to a burning woodshop at the end of Gartley Place in Nuuanu, about 40 to 50 feet from Pali Highway.
Seelig said the 3:47 a.m. fire caused about $180,000 in damage to the structure, and the nearby house was exposed only to some heat. Firefighters hosed down the flames from the highway, and the blaze was under control within 11 minutes, he said.
Sunday afternoon a smoldering fire started in a large, empty building in Kapolei used as a recreation center.
Audio equipment inside the unoccupied building on Cowpens Street started to spark around 2:05 p.m., creating a small fire that started to spread. Seelig said firefighters arrived in time to prevent substantial damage.
The fire was extinguished around 2:30 p.m.
No one was injured, and damage to the audio equipment and an interior wall is estimated at $20,000.
Meanwhile, investigators determined that a fire Saturday afternoon at the Kaiaka Beach Park restroom in Waialua was likely set intentionally, Seelig said Sunday.
The fire broke out in one of the bathroom stalls at 1:56 p.m. and was under control by 2:35 p.m.
Seelig said damage to the wooden roof is estimated at $100,000. Fire investigators forwarded the case to Honolulu police.
