Nearly a year after a family escaped from a fire in their St. Paul home, their youngest children cut a ribbon on Tuesday in front of their rebuilt house after shouts of “Welcome home, Wirtz family!”
The kindness and generosity of numerous people and companies, in addition to their homeowner’s insurance, means the family of six will be able to return to the property that’s been in Tara Wirtz’s family for generations. And they hope they’ll be home in time for Christmas.
“About a year ago, they lost everything of their property and their belongings to a devastating house fire, but they didn’t lose their family or their spirit,” said Caleb Brunz, owner and president of Paul Davis Restoration of Minneapolis/St. Paul, based in St. Paul.
Last Dec. 19, Wirtz woke up “coughing like crazy” because of smoke in a basement bedroom, where she was asleep with her two youngest children. The fire department says they were called just before midnight to the North End home.
The fire, determined to be electrical, “shot around the room; all the wires were on fire,” said husband James Wirtz, who was at work, of what his family told him. “They were surrounded by flames and the smoke was just burrowing down on them.”
Tara Wirtz rushed her children Jessie and Jazzy, now 8 and 9, upstairs. Her son Randall, who’s now 17, was in his bedroom. Wirtz started filling buckets of water.
“I don’t know why I was trying to save the house, but it was my first instinct — this is where we live, everything we have is in this house,” she said.
The home on Jessamine Avenue near Jackson Street was owned by Wirtz’s great-grandparents and it was where her grandmother was born. Her grandmother then owned the house before passing it along to Wirtz.
Wirtz gave a bucket to Randall, who ran down to the basement to see if he could extinguish the fire.
“There was fire coming out of the electrical outlets and I looked at it and thought, ‘I’m not going to die here,'” he said.
He went back up to the second floor to wake his 15-year-old sister, Taya, and retrieve the family cat.
“By then, I heard the oven explode and a cloud of smoke rolled through the house,” he said. “It was terrifying, but it was like, ‘My stepdad’s gone, I need to make sure my siblings and my mom are out of the house.'”
A family friend, also a teenager, was staying at the home. They got him, along with their dog and the rest of the family, out of the house.
“My son is my hero,” Tara Wirtz said of Randall. “I couldn’t have done it without him.”
The St. Paul Fire Department and Mayor Melvin Carter presented Tara Wirtz with the Heroism Award, the department’s highest civilian honor, on Tuesday afternoon.
Rebuilding from ground up
Two weeks after the fire at the Wirtz home, a blaze at a home in St. Paul’s Payne-Phalen home resulted in the deaths of four children. Similar to the Wirtz fire, the fire was in the middle of the night when the husband was at work and the wife tried to get her six young children out of the house.
Hearing about that fire “really affected us,” Tara Wirtz said. She asked herself, “‘How did we get out when they couldn’t?’ They were babies. It was just gut-wrenching to think about. … I still think about that family a lot.”
The Wirtz family stayed at a hotel for a month and a half before they started renting a house through their insurance.
“We’ve been trying to replace everything that we had in our life,” Tara Wirtz said. She says “the community helped us a lot,” along with their families. Their children’s school started a GoFundMe, which was of major assistance.
James Wirtz went through the debris and found Tara’s four children’s baby books. The priceless mementos were “in pretty rough shape,” Tara said, but she was able to re-create them.
The damage was so extensive that the house needed to be demolished and rebuilt from the ground up, but Tara Wirtz never doubted they’d stay on her family’s land. She figured if they ran out of money from their insurance and their house was unfinished, “I’ll roll up my sleeves and start building.”
Trevor Doerr, restoration project manager for Paul Davis MSP, said the rebuild took about five months from the time they secured permits.
“After hearing about Tara and how she saved all her kids, I was blown away,” Doerr said. He worked with a variety of subcontractors, telling them about the Wirtz family’s story and that they’re “salt-of-the earth people,” and the companies offered discounts or donated supplies and labor, so the insurance money would go farther.
The house, which appeared to date to 1890, is a lot different and nicer than it was before. They didn’t have a dishwasher previously and now they do in a kitchen that’s about twice as large as it was. The house is more open-concept. They still have five bedrooms and now more bathrooms with 2½. “The heart of the house” — the living room — is Tara’s favorite part.
The finishing touches are being placed on the house and the family plans to be living there as soon as possible.
Sprinkler system for peace of mind
There are also safety features, including egress windows in the basement and a sprinkler system.
Paul Davis contacted the National Fire Sprinkler Association’s Minnesota chapter, which solicited donations from all their members, including suppliers, manufacturers, contractors and their partnership with the union, Sprinkler Fitters Local 417, to donate and install the sprinkler system, said Sean Flaherty, chairman of the association’s Minnesota chapter.
He said they wanted to keep the family safe, protect their new home and give the family peace of mind “that they were never going to have a disaster like that again.”
Because the water lines in St. Paul are old and wouldn’t allow enough water volume to power a sprinkler system, they installed a tank in the basement that stores 300 gallons of water and has a pump that’s connected to sprinklers throughout the house.
The sprinkler system will mean “that I can sleep at night and not be scared,” Tara Wirtz said. “… This past year, I’ve been waking up continuously in the middle of the night, constantly checking the house rental I’m in because I have a little bit of PTSD.”
Newly built townhomes or apartments with three or more units are required to have sprinklers in Minnesota, but single-family and duplex homes are not, Flaherty said. At the company where Flaherty works, Viking Automatic Sprinkler Co., he said they get three or four requests annually about sprinkler systems at homes that aren’t required to have them; they’re typically for new builds.
“It’s usually driven by the owner being educated enough to want that in their home or insurance driving that,” said Flaherty.
Insurance premiums can be lowered by as much as 15 percent if a home has a full sprinkler system, according to Flaherty. For a 3,000-square-foot home, it would cost about $7,500 to connect a sprinkler system to a water line.
Fire safety planning
The State Fire Marshal Division offers these tips:
• Make sure each family member is aware of two ways out of each room.
• Practice your family escape plan twice each year.
• Designate a safe meeting place outside your home everyone can get to after a fire.
• Install smoke alarms in every bedroom, outside each sleeping area and on every level of the home, including the basement.
• Change your smoke alarm batteries at least once a year. Make a habit of replacing batteries each fall and spring during daylight saving time.
• Stay in the kitchen when cooking. If you leave the room, turn off the stove and move the pan from the burner.
