After the Fire

SARATOGA - Shortly before the sun rose above her home in the town of Saratoga on Thursday, 82-year-old Marty Fink sat down on a snowbank in her backyard and watched everything she owned go up in flames.

A call came in to the Quaker Springs Fire Department shortly after 5 a.m.

When Fire Chief Sean Dooley arrived on the scene, Fink's two-story colonial home at 966 county Route 70 was engulfed in flames. Before the morning was over, the house would be totally lost, with everything the woman owned collapsed into the basement. Fink had no insurance, Dooley said,

She told fire investigators she lit a kerosene lamp Wednesday night in the bedroom, which, by early Thursday morning, had ignited the wallpaper.

"She tried to put it out for an extended amount of time by herself. One of the local farmers who was going to work spotted it," Dooley said. "She was lucky she got out."

Fink lived alone in the house and slept in a chair in her living room that was heated by an electric space heater, said Saratoga County Fire Inspector Jerry Stephen.

The house had no telephone and no running water due to frozen pipes.

To get water, Fink would go outside to a stream, break up the ice and carry it back into her house in a pail. She used the same method Thursday morning in an attempt to combat the fire.

"She went outside and began breaking the ice to get water into a pail. She went back inside the house and wet a towel and tried to put out the fire. This went on for almost an hour," Stephen said.

The pail was heavy and Fink could only carry a little bit at a time.

"The smoke and fire became so great, she had to get out," he said. "She left her home, walked out back and sat on a snow bank with just a sweater on and watched her home burn down."

Fink was taken to a neighbor's house and the county chapter of the volunteer organization After The Fire was called in to provide support. The only thing salvaged from the fire was some change in coins that she had saved in a steel container.
Fire and rescue companies including Quaker Springs, Schuylerville, Victory Mills and Arvin Hart responded to the blaze.

"I've seen a lot of things in my 11 years as a fire inspector. I've seen death. I've seen destruction. But I've never seen anything like this," Stephen said.

"After going through all this today, all she wanted to know was if we could run a lead cord from the power pole to her barn. She said, 'If you could put power out back to my barn, I could live back there,' " he said.

by Thomas Dimopoulos
published in The Post-Star. March 6. 2009.