Up in Smoke

For the family, on the night of November 30, the thoughts were both nostalgic and in the moment. The Balcos children simply couldn’t believe they were watching their house burn down. Though they had reluctantly come to grips with their parents’ decision to sell, the structure on fire in front of them was still home—“the house.” Only six days earlier, they had gathered—three generations of Balcoses and in-laws—for the lavish Thanksgiving dinner their parents had been serving every year for as long as the kids could remember. In less than a month, they had planned to meet again to exchange gifts around a big traditional Christmas tree in the living room. They believed that year’s holidays would be the last ones they’d celebrate in the house because next year another family would be gathering in the sunny rooms with the spectacular views of the lake.

“It was strange,” Eileen Bauman said months later. “The fire seemed like it was smoldering, with no visible flames, and then it would shoot up and seem to move around. And it was so cold. Still, the whole sidewalk on the other side of Sheridan was lined with people, just standing there, watching.”

Because of the cold—thermometers would dip into the low teens, with a wind chill near zero—and because there was nothing they could do as the firefighters fought the stubborn blaze deep into the night and because Ophelia was waiting anxiously at the couple’s town home, Manny and three of his children departed before midnight. Daughter Eydie Waletzki came from work at about 12:45 a.m. and stayed an hour and a half or so, “just watching.” Later she said, “There was still smoke coming out of every window. When I asked one of the firefighters when we’d be able to go in and get things, he looked at me and said, ‘Who?’ And I said, ‘My family.’ And he said, ‘Never. It’s going to collapse on itself.’ That was about two o’clock.” The roof fell into the house within an hour.

For one of the Balcos children, the experience was particularly bizarre. Ethan Balcos, who teaches dance at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte, was alerted to the fire by a phone call from Edwin’s wife. Oddly, Ethan was then the first of the siblings to reach their youngest brother, Eric, who lived in the Twin Cities, but had not been answering his cell phone. “It was so weird,” said Ethan. “I told Eric he had to go to the fire—and then I talked to my dad and my siblings on their cell phones at the scene.” Ethan eventually went to bed, but couldn’t fall asleep. He thought, among other things, about the last time he had been in the house. That had been the previous Christmas (he and his wife, Kimberley, had not been able to come home on Thanksgiving), and, before leaving that day, he had walked through every room. The decision had been made to sell, and he knew, he said, that it likely would be the last opportunity he’d have to spend time there. Now, as the house burned, he thought of those sun-splashed rooms blackened with smoke.

The next morning, he went online to a Twin Cities TV station’s website and watched the house’s demolition.

At 3:21 p.m., on December 1—almost twenty hours after the MFD’s arrival—the “last unit,” in departmental language, finally “cleared” the area. All told, about forty firefighters using fifteen rigs and other pieces of firefighting aparatus battled the West Isles blaze. Beyond all accounting, of course, was the toll taken on the neighborhood and family. The Balcos house was a total loss. After an inspection by investigators from both the fire and police departments, the fire’s cause was deemed accidental—the malfunctioning of the electrical circuitry beneath the laundry room in the rear of the house. “Old wiring, bad luck,” in Eileen’s words.

“You never really get used to it,” Bleskachek, a firefighter for seventeen years, said two weeks later. “Professionally, you’re thinking about what you need to do to find and knock down the fire. Afterward, when you’re picking up and you see things in the rubble—things that have washed out of the building, things that once meant something to someone—that’s really sad. Here, there were Christmas decorations—ornaments, wreaths, lights. I don’t know if they had already been put up or not. Anyway, they had been washed out by all the water. I saw them on the sidewalk.”