OXFORD – A woman and her dog escaped injury from a fire in their home at 134 Coldwater Brook Road on Thursday, but fire officials said the house was severely damaged.
Firefighters from Oxford, Paris and Norway responded to the scene.
Sue Dore, who lives at the house with her fiance, Roger Stengel, said she had returned home after running errands and saw a baker’s rack burning in the kitchen when she entered the house.
She immediately took the couple’s German shepherd, Storm, outside and put the dog in the detached garage.
“I went back inside and threw a towel over the fire but it spread so quickly,” she said. “I ran back outside and called the Fire Department.”
Stengel, a concrete supervisor, was in Vermont working on Thursday.
Hugging a shawl around her shoulders and crying, Dore, 47, said she and Stengel, 50, are getting married in January. “My wedding dress is in there. I don’t know what happened to it,” she said.
She said the couple had planned to put new hardwood floors in the house this weekend. They had lived in the one-story house for three years.
Dore called Stengel on a cell phone as she stood outside. “I called the insurance company. … I love you,” she said to her fiance.
“The kitchen is pretty well trashed,” said Lt. Steve Cordwell of the Oxford Fire Department. “The house is salvageable, although severely damaged.”
Cordwell said the cause of the fire was undetermined, but it appeared to have started in the kitchen and spread to the ceiling. Firefighters had to pull down the ceiling and insulation to put out the fire completely.
Dore said she grabbed her pocketbook and laptop computer from the house. “It was all I could think of to grab,” she said.
Dore said she and Stengel will temporarily stay with a friend or in a hotel until they are able to return home.
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