Flaming pie leads to soggy rooms at Spring Valley Sunday

A fire in a third-floor apartment at the Perry Lutheran Home Spring Valley campus at 501 12th St. in Perry brought a swift response Sunday morning about 9 a.m. from the Perry Volunteer Fire Department.

The Perry Police Department also responded to the incident, which occurred in one of the facility’s assisted living units. There were no injuries to any residents, and residents on the third floor were asked to move briefly to the first-floor lobby while the firefighters worked.

Perry Volunteer Fire Department Chief Chris Hinds said the fire began in the apartment’s oven when a dessert ignited.

“It was a Marie Callender’s pie — apple, to be exact — that caught fire,” Hinds said Monday. “I’m not sure if they forgot about it or the timer didn’t work or they had a runaway oven or what, but the pie caught on fire, which set off the sprinkler system.”

The sprinkler system, which was activated only in the residence with the fire and not throughout the third floor, functioned as it was designed, he said.

“They flooded everything,” Hinds said. “Until we were able to get the system shut off, they were just pumping water in there. Every cabinet drawer you pulled open was full of water, and there was water standing on the floor.”

Hinds estimated the cost of the water damage exceeded that of the fire damage.

“The fire in the oven with the pie pretty much destroyed the cook stove with the oven in it,” Hinds said, “but the sprinkler system probably did — I’m guessing here — $6,000 to $8,000 worth of damage to the apartment. But it did what it was supposed to do. Better to pay $5,000 or $10,000 to clean up an apartment like that than $5 million or $10 million to rebuild the whole place because it burned down.”

Hinds commended Maureen Haglund and the rest of the Spring Valley staff for the promptness and orderliness of their evacuation of the third floor.

“They did an excellent job of evacuating the resident to the first floor,” Hinds said, “and an excellent job of getting everything squared away so that when we came in, we could go right upstairs and didn’t have to worry about any residents or anything. It had all been taken care of.”

Hinds said the Perry firefighters always carry a “pie-shaped wedge of wood to jam into the sprinkler head in order to shut off the flow of water,” but the Spring Valley sprinkler heads “are designed different from that. We have to have a little, metal, screw-in device that would kind of remind you of some type of a C-clamp, which we didn’t have anything like that. So until we had a way to shut the water off, we couldn’t stop the flow coming into the apartment.”

Hinds said the Perry Volunteer Fire Department will now look to equip itself with the new screw-in devices.

“We’re going to order a couple dozen of them so that we’ve got plenty of them on the trucks so if we encounter that kind again, we’ll have what it takes to quickly shut the sprinkler system down,” he said.