Mum says alarm likely saved her life in house fire

A mother said her life and that of her teenage son were likely saved by her fire alarm.

Emma Parker, 45, was upstairs at her home in Haddon Way, St Ives, when she heard the alarm beeping after being triggered by a fire that started on the ground floor.

The Cambridgeshire County Council manager was in the building with her 15-year-old son, Tyler, and cat, Max, when the fire began on Friday morning.

"Without a fire alarm, I think there's a risk we would have become trapped. This would have been a very different escape, or not," she said.

She said there were just a few minutes between first hearing the alarm and standing outside calling 999 at about 08:20 GMT as she "watched [her] house burn down".

"The downstairs is gutted," she said. "We need windows; the ceilings have caved in. We haven't got any roof tiles."

The fire is believed to have been started by batteries or their chargers stored in a room on the ground floor, but an investigation into the cause has not yet concluded.

She initially thought the beeping from her fire alarm meant the battery needed changing.

"I quickly went downstairs and could smell before I could see there was something wrong," she said.

"I could hear crackling and walked through the living room that joins to the dining room and then I could see yellow flames."

She said she did not have time to try to intervene, instead rushing to wake her son and open a window for her cat, Max.

She last saw him sitting on their conservatory roof as smoke billowed behind him before Cambridgeshire Fire and Rescue Service arrived.

"We just assumed he was dead," she said.

It was not until four or five hours later that the family found him in the bushes near the home. He had burnt paws and singed whiskers, but was otherwise unharmed.

Photos of her elder son, 19-year-old Ethan, were lost in the fire but she praised the fire service, who retrieved birth certificates, passports, bank cards and a small number of clothes.

They had "black nostrils" after the fire, she said, but her partner, Nathan, and Ethan had already left for work at the time.

More than £3,000 towards new clothes, shoes, vet bills, electronics and household items has been raised for the family through a GoFundMe page.

Cambridgeshire Fire and Rescue Service said crews from Huntingdon, St Neots, Chatteris, Ely, and Cambridge, along with the turntable ladder were called to the property at 08.21 GMT and worked to extinguish the fire.

Crews returned to their stations by 13.15 GMT, a spokesperson said.

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