Stratford fire claims home of Abby teacher
Cole and Jaime (Garrigan) Kaiser and their twin seven-month-old daughters, Callie and Jolie, were thankfully not home on Saturday night when a fire destroyed their rural Stratford house.
Chad Willemssen, Stratford Area Fire Department (SAFD) assistant fire chief, said his department received the emergency call at 6:58 p.m. on Saturday to a house on fire at 119111 Moline Drive in the town of Cleveland. He said the Kaiser family’s neighbor reported the house on fire.
Moline Drive was formerly named Kaiser Road before Marathon County’s new addressing system took effect a few years ago. It is a dead end road to the east of STH 97 located six miles north of Stratford.
Jake Kolb, SAFD captain, could already see flames exiting the home’s west windows while driving the fire engine on STH 97 near Rock Oil Refinery north of Stratford. He was one of the first firefighters on scene and he took command of developing a strategy for firefighters on how to extinguish the house fire until Willemssen arrived.
“When we arrived, we didn’t know whether anyone was in the house or not, so I got a crew of firefighters ready to enter the south side of the house to conduct a search,” Kolb said. “Then I found out from Marathon County dispatch that contact was made with the homeowners who said nobody was in the house.”
Willemssen said it was difficult for firefighters to extinguish the house fire because he learned from Kaiser family members the home was built in 1907 with a balloon frame construction. He said balloon framing is a style of wood-house building that uses long, vertical 2x4s for the exterior walls that go from the basement to the top of the house.
Balloon frame wooden houses, which were built from the early 19th century until World War II, poses unique fire fighting problems because they lack horizontal fire stops between the studs inside of the exterior walls. That’s why a fire that starts in the basement could spread quickly to the first and second stories and attic in a balloon-frame wooden home.
“It was a low attic probably not even two feet high so I couldn’t put any firefighters in there and I also couldn’t put any firefighters on the house roof due to the risk of it caving in,” Willemssen said.
SAFD received mutual aid from Central Fire and the Athens, Edgar, Hewitt and McMillan fire departments. SAFD told the Athens Fire Department to only bring personnel because it already had enough fire engines and tankers from the other departments at the scene of the house fire. Central Fire, which covers the cities of Abbotsford and Colby and village of Dorchester, didn’t respond to the house fire but rather had a fire engine at the SAFD station to cover any other fire calls SAFD might’ve received while it was working on extinguishing the Kaiser family’s house.
Willemseen estimated there were at least 40 firefighters from all departments who worked together to extinguish the blaze. He said the cause of the house fire is undetermined. He also estimated firefighters used 90,000 to 100,000 gallons of water to extinguish the blaze. SAFD remained at the house fire scene until 1:30 a.m. on Sunday.
Single-digit temperatures on Saturday night made it difficult for firefighters to extinguish the house fire because the water and fire fighting equipment like their ladders froze into ice. Willemssen said SAFD was fortunate there was a Marathon County Highway Department worker available to spread salt on Moline Drive which was getting slippery because of the freezing water on it from fire tankers exchanging water.
Willemssen learned the house was currently being remodeled and a concrete slab was poured for a two-stall garage onto the home the day before the fire.
Cole and Jaimie Kaiser are known as selfless people who both graduated from Stratford High School. The couple got married on August 3, 2019. Their twin daughters were born on April 27 of this year. Cole works as a mechanic at Klemme Sales in Stratford and Jaime is a special education teacher in the Abbotsford School District. The Stratford community is lending a helping hand to the Kaiser family by raising money and donating essential living supplies it lost in the house fire.
