A Salem firefighter suffered minor injuries while battling a two-alarm house fire in south Salem Tuesday afternoon.
Firefighters responded to a home in the 500 block of Southeast Winding Way in the Faye Wright neighborhood around 5 p.m. Tuesday, said Brian Carrara, Salem Fire Department deputy fire chief for administrative services.
He declined to elaborate on the firefighter’s injuries, citing medical privacy. The firefighter was taken to the hospital.
No people were home when the fire broke out, Carrara said. Firefighters arrived to find flames venting from the front of the house.
Responders rescued a dog and rabbit from the home.
“That’s a win,” Carrara said. “Structures are structures, lives are lives.”
The blaze came at the expected end of a heat wave that’s broken several local records. Temperatures in Salem hit triple digits Tuesday for the fifth day in a row.
Carrara said the fire response was challenging because many of the firefighters who responded were coming from a brush fire that broke out earlier Tuesday on Northeast Portland Road.
The house fire required 16 fire apparatus and 30 people to get the blaze under control. As of 7:45 p.m., Carrara said the fire was out and the fire marshal was still on scene investigating and said they don’t yet have a suspected cause.
Two-alarm house fires are rare, Carrara said. The department last week responded to 61 fires, he said, a higher than usual total due to the heat.
Firefighters will monitor the scene because of the high heat to prevent any flare-ups.
Contact reporter Rachel Alexander: [email protected] or 503-575-1241.
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Rachel Alexander is Salem Reporter’s managing editor. She joined Salem Reporter when it was founded in 2018 and covers city news, education, nonprofits and a little bit of everything else. She’s been a journalist in Oregon and Washington for a decade. Outside of work, she’s a skater and board member with Salem’s Cherry City Roller Derby and can often be found with her nose buried in a book.
