MIRACLE: How couple survived 35 minutes in blazing fire

MUNCIE – The night their home burned, nobody expected Tom and Pam Price to survive.

As their house north of Muncie fell in around them and they lay gasping for air on the floor of their bedroom, the Prices couldn't possibly know that a decision had been made that could have sealed their fates: With the two-story house on Sequoia Court fully engulfed in flames, the decision was made to withdraw firefighters — who had nearly been caught in a collapse inside.

The blaze was designated as a "defensive" fire, which meant that conditions inside turned too dangerous to attempt a rescue.

The Delaware County coroner was asked to stand by.

The Indiana state fire marshal was notified, a standard early step taken when a fire has resulted in death.

But Pam Price's labored breaths during her third call to 911 — even after she could no longer speak and had almost certainly lapsed into unconsciousness — convinced a dispatcher that the couple could be saved. Another dispatcher convinced the chief of one of the small volunteer fire departments responding to send men back in.

Skill on the part of emergency services workers? Luck? Miracle?

Maybe all of the above.

It just doesn't happen: two people surviving more than a half-hour in a fully engulfed, smoke-filled house.

Until it does happen, leaving everyone to hit the reset button on their definition of heroism — and miracles.

900 gallons of water a minute

In her first call to 911, just before 1:17 a.m. Saturday, May 30, Pam Price sounded eerily calm. She told dispatcher Katherine Ulrey that her house was on fire and, after prompting, assured the dispatcher that they would get out of the house.

Less than 30 seconds later, dispatcher Lisa Coutinho sent the Hamilton Township Volunteer Fire Company to the Price home. Calls began coming in to 911 from neighbors who said flames and smoke were visible and that the fire seemed to have started in the garage.

Neighbors told dispatchers they didn't see the Prices outside their house, and in a second call to 911, Pam Price said they could not get out.

Hamilton Township Truck 113 was the first on the scene, with Hamilton Fire Chief Tim Baty and four other firefighters on board. Truck 113 was the first of eight Hamilton Township vehicles there that night. Others from volunteer fire departments and EMS services from Eaton, Albany, Gaston, Liberty Township and Yorktown responded.

An aerial or "ladder" vehicle, Truck 113 had been in use by Hamilton Township only since January.

"Delaware County is unique," Baty told The Star Press three days after the Sequoia Court fire. "You think of ladder trucks as being municipal apparatus. Now, us and Albany have ladders now and Yorktown's is to be delivered on July 4."

Because the Country Village subdivision, where the Prices live, has no fire hydrants, tanker trucks fed water to the ladder truck. That night, Truck 113 pumped 900 gallons of water a minute on the Price home.

The application of water alone was not enough. Firefighters had to go into the house. Even after fire crews began arriving, the Prices were not able to escape the fire.

'There's no radio traffic'

"We can't get out of the house," Pam Price told dispatchers in a second call to 911. A dispatcher asked Price if she wanted to stay on the phone with her, but Price said no.

Outside the house, Baty and fire crews were finding entry into the house difficult.

"The house was fully involved from the time of the second 911 call," Baty said. "Our firefighters go to the only visible windows they can find, ones on the east side, that are very small and narrow. They put a ladder up on the east side of the house by the garage, which is pretty hot from (as Baty soon learned) an intense magnesium fire from their Toyota Prius."

On the back of the house, two firefighters made entry through a window while another stood by on a ladder.

"These guys make it into the hallway and they start heading east because we know they are somewhere in that direction," Baty said.

Metal duct work from the attic had collapsed into the second floor and firefighters outside, looking through a window, reported that an upstairs bedroom had fallen into the garage.

"The guys in that hallway report the collapse, then there's no radio traffic," Baty said. "I get very concerned. I called a few times and there was no answer. They come out finally, around the side of the house. Now the question is risk versus benefit.

"The defensive fire decision is made," Baty said. "Nobody goes back into the house."

Call changed everything

When a fire chief calls "defensive fire" on a fire scene, it means that conditions inside the building are too dangerous for firefighters because of heat or structural damage.

It usually means that firefighters believe anyone inside the building is dead or unable to be rescued without risking the lives of firefighters even more than they are already at risk.

In a 2010 article meant to help fire chiefs gauge how feasible it is to send firefighters into an active fire, the magazine Fire Engineering reported on a survivability study of people caught in a fire. The survivability time ranged from four to 10 minutes, the magazine reported.

For local firefighters, the 2011 death of Scott Davis of the Muncie Fire Department is still a vivid memory. Davis was killed when he was caught in the collapse of a church that was ablaze.

"I called the state fire marshal's office right then," Baty said about his next step after declaring the May 30 fire a defensive one. "On a fire fatality, the state fire marshal has to be notified."

Delaware County Coroner Scott Hahn told The Star Press that he was also contacted and told that it was likely the fire would lead to fatalities.

Using the aerial truck, firefighters began trying to "knock down" the fire.

What Baty heard next, from 911 dispatcher Lisa Coutinho, changed everything.

"Lisa gets on the radio and says, 'We can still hear them,'" Baty said.

'Don't hang up on me'

That night, as dispatcher Coutinho worked from the fire console in the 911 dispatch center in downtown Muncie, dispatcher Nathan Ledbetter worked the EMS, or ambulance service, console.

Ledbetter had been a 911 dispatcher for just about a year at the time of the Sequoia Court fire. The Albany native has a history of emergency service, however, with several years as an Eaton EMT in the 2000s.

Ledbetter answered the phone when Pam Price called 911 a third time around 1:30 a.m. — about 14 minutes after she first called to report the fire.

"We're trapped on the second floor," she told Ledbetter, who asked her where she was in the house.

"Don't hang up on me, OK?" Ledbetter said to Price, who told the dispatcher that her husband was no longer talking to her.

"Oh, we're in desperate shape," Price said as she began to struggle with each breath.

Baty — who said the Prices had stuffed towels and sheets in the cracks around their bedroom door — said the homeowners most likely couldn't get out of the house because the only stairway was next to the garage, which was burning intensely.

Ledbetter said that dispatchers are "all trained the same way ... There's no training when somebody is trapped in a fire. It's all instinct.

"You tell them that smoke rises, that they should get down on the floor," Ledbetter said. "It's stuff you learn in elementary school."

Audio of the the call between Pam Price and Ledbetter reflected the dispatcher's increasing urgency as Price stops talking.

"Pam? Pam?" Ledbetter said in an effort to rouse Price. "If you can hear me, we're trying to get to you, hon. Keep fighting."

"There was no point where I couldn't hear her breathing," Ledbetter told The Star Press this week.

"I kept (the Prices) on the line," Ledbetter said. "I'm talking to my (EMS) truck and I'm letting him know I can hear her breathing. I'm also telling the fire dispatcher (Coutinho) I can hear her breathing and she's telling her guy."

Meanwhile, Ledbetter kept repeating to Price to stay with him, to push buttons on her iPhone 6 to let him know she could hear him.

With the house ablaze and a few dozen firefighters working outside, only Pam Price's gasps for air are audible on that phone call.

'Get your butts in there'

After Coutinho told firefighters that Ledbetter could hear Pam Price breathing over the 911 call, Baty had a decision to make. Much of the severe fire had been knocked down thanks to water from the ladder truck, but portions of the house had already collapsed.

"The living conditions in this house fire were not possible," Baty said. "For some crazy reason, they were there, but to be the fire chief or in charge of an incident, the hardest decision to make is to say, 'Get your butts in there.'

"Right before we went defensive, I thought we lost three firefighters," he added. "My cardinal rule has been, once I made that decision, I'm never going backwards.

"If the 911 center had not got back on that radio and said we still hear them, this situation would have been completely different."

At 1:48 a.m., shortly after an internal collapse, Baty had called for the state fire marshal, assuming that the Prices would not survive.

By 1:51 a.m., Baty had authorized a second search of the house.

'A sigh of relief'

Brian Copher had been the chief of the Eaton Volunteer Fire Department for four months by the time of the Sequoia Court fire, but had previously served on the Hamilton Township department. Copher arrived on Eaton Tanker 24 after the call was made to take a "defensive" stance.

"Baty felt it was time to go in and do an attempt at a rescue," Copher said. "He asked me and my crew to go in."

At the top of ladders on one side of the house, Copher couldn't find an immediately apparent entrance to the second floor of the Price home.

"Normally we would go through a window, but that bedroom had smaller windows," Copher said. "At that time, we weren't exactly sure of the structural integrity to go through the house."

Noticing that vinyl siding had melted, exposing the wooden framing of the house and interior drywall, Copher decided to take a more direct approach.

"We kicked in what was left of the exterior wall," Copher said. "We are taught, and our basic premise, is to gain entry through any way feasible."

Copher said he and fellow firefighters "lucked out" and found the Prices immediately.

"That was the room they were in," he said. "We didn't have to go any further through the structure."

As Ledbetter listened through Pam Price's phone, he suddenly heard more than her breathing. He heard help.

And then he heard a "one ... two ... three" count as firefighters picked up the Prices and carried them — finally, 35 minutes after Pam Price initially called 911 and against all reasonable odds of survival in a house fire — out of the house.

At 1:54 a.m. treatment was begun by EMS crews on the scene. The Prices were taken to IU Health Ball Memorial Hospital and, later, Eskenazi Health in Indianapolis. They were initially in critical condition but improved in the days following the fire.

Hearing the rescue, Ledbetter said be breathed "a sigh of relief."

"I could still hear her breathing once they got to her," the dispatcher said. "I kept talking to her and talking to her and chances are she didn't have the phone up to her ear. I'm just surprised the phone worked."

Copher said firefighters never gave up hope.

"In the fire service, we try to be as positive and optimistic as we can. That's why we do this, to save lives. Regardless of the amount of time, we went in there with full hopes those people were alive. It was a major relief to know they were still alive."

'It's miraculous'

Baty told The Star Press on Wednesday that he had not established a cause of the fire.

As for the Prices, their recovery, considering the seriousness of the fire, has been good. Tom Price was released from Eskenazi Health on Wednesday, the hospital said, while Pam Price remained in fair condition. Their son, Fletcher Price, asked that his father's privacy be respected as he continued to recover.

Tom Price is the head of the photojournalism sequence at Ball State University. Pam Price is project manager at the ECI Regional Planning District. Because of those positions and the attention that comes with them, the Prices have garnered an outpouring of well wishes this week and thousands of dollars of donations through a Go Fund Me campaign online.

Baty said he knew how unlikely the positive outcome was. Several factors worked in the favor of the Prices. They knew to keep their bedroom door shut and filled cracks around it with towels. Luckily enough, no neighbor kicked in a door to rescue them before firefighters arrived. If that had happened, additional oxygen might have fueled the fire even more, Baty said.

Although Baty initially reported that there were no working smoke detectors in the Price home, he said Wednesday that there were smoke detectors and that they had alerted the Prices to the fire.

He paused when asked if he could recall a fire in which people were rescued after more than a half-hour in such conditions.

"I've been a firefighter for 20 years and a paramedic and EMT for 20 years," Baty said. "I've never seen this happen. For somebody to be in a fully-involved house fire and to come out with no burns and the two to be recovering so well, it's astonishing. It's miraculous.

"They had everything working for them. Dispatchers, EMS and fire response ... and probably a little bit of God."

Contact Keith Roysdon at 765-213-5828 and follow him on Facebook and Twitter.

Donations to Price family

Jordan Huffer, a former photojournalism student of Tom Price, established a GoFundMe site to collect donations for the Prices. That site is http://www.gofundme.com/vu6pz7w

Also, Women in Business Unlimited started a clothing drive for the Prices. Items may be donated at Toyota Muncie. Information: Melissa Daniels at toyotamelissa@gmail.com