It was around 4 a.m. when Denver Krushel -- an aerospace control operator with 15 Wing -- was awoken by the sound of a strange car alarm just outside he and wife Catherine's home, followed by what sounded like an explosion of sorts.
“At first I thought it was just someone playing with the horn or something like that, but then there was an orange glow coming through the window and that seemed weird,” Krushel said while recounting what happened that evening. “So I looked out the window and it was one of those moments where your eyes see it but your brain takes a second to process what you’re looking at… Then it registered and I yelled something incredibly pithy like ‘merciful heavens, that truck is on fire’ or something like that.”
Not just on fire, but fully and completely engulfed, to the point the blaze had already spread to the fence in front of the truck and was threatening both the Krushel’s vehicle and the one parked on the other side of the conflagration.
Krushel scrambled outside and went to warn his neighbour about the danger to his vehicle, which had the plastic moulding already starting to burn. He grabbed a nearby wash basin and was using it to help put out that fire when wife Catherine called out a dire warning from their doorway.
“I had seen the red glow from our dining room window and called 911, then I yelled at Denver that our neighbour’s fence line that is connected to ours is in front of a gigantic tree, so he hoped the fence to our neighbour’s yard to deal with that,” she said.
That tree had just happened to have been trimmed back only days earlier -- a turn of events Denver rightfully called ‘fortuitious’ -- but still contained a huge amount of dry, flammable material that would have undoubtedly spread the fire to the apartment complex without fast intervention.
Denver and the neighbour were soon joined by another Good Samaritan from across the parking lot and all went to work fighting the blaze as best they could, with Krushel wielding a garden hose to try and keep the fire inside a perimeter.
Fortunately, the professionals were on the way.
“So my poor husband is out there in his underwear trying to fight this fire, but the fire department showed up in only a few minutes,” Catherine said. “They were there really quick, and once they got there Denver just backed off and let them do their job.”
It turns out that pouring a couple gallons a minute onto a fire isn’t the same as over 500 gallons in the same time span, and the Moose Jaw Fire Department was quickly able to bring things under control with no further damage.
The fire had started outside the apartment of Dela Collins, with her fenceline taking the worst damage. She felt there was little question that without Krushel’s fast action, things would have turned out far worse.
“I have no doubt that the situation could have been much worse had he not reacted so quickly and level-headedly,” Collins said. “I’m very grateful for how the Krushel’s handled the situation. As it stands my fence and the truck took the brunt of the damage, but it could have easily become a house fire were it not for their quick thinking.”
The truck was a complete loss, with $30,000 in damage reported, but the rest of the mess in the yard was cleaned up by the weekend.
All in all, a far, far better result than what could have been.
“I say that my husband is a hero, but he doesn’t like taking that kind of credit,” Catherine said with a laugh.
