By Tien-Shun Lee
A Rego Park woman who was exhausted after being stuck underground in a subway train and then walking home during last Thursday's blackout fell asleep with several candles lit in her kitchen and awoke to a screaming fire alarm and a house filled with smoke.
Sheryl Fetik, 48, said she ran downstairs when she smelled the smoke and saw flames leaping from her kitchen table, where a candle had fallen off into a box of vegetable oil that she keeps underneath the table to use when cleaning silverware.
Fetik's house fire was one of 71 blazes that occurred in the city during the period from the beginning of the blackout at around 4:30 p.m. last Thursday to 6 p.m. Friday, said Mike Loughran, a Fire Department spokesman. Normally there are about five to 10 fires in the city during a 24-hour period, he said.
Of the 71 fires, 23 were caused by candles, said Loughran.
Since Fetik's electricity-dependent phone was not working, she ran outside to a neighbor's house and asked to use her phone to call 911. The neighbor then called Fetik's sister, Emilie Fetik, 40, who lives in Fresh Meadows, and left a message on her answering machine telling her that Fetik was OK but that her house was on fire.
“I don't panic too much with emergencies,” said Fetik, who has lived in the black, two-story, one-family house on Eliot Avenue near Austin Street all her life. “The worst part was feeling that I had gotten too tired and that the candle had fallen.”
Shortly after Fetik called 911 at around 9:15 p.m., a fire technician arrived at her house, surveyed the situation and called for help, said Fetik.
“He was hysterical. He thought he saw something that was going to create a huge fire,” said Fetik.
About 25 minutes later, three fire trucks arrived, put ladders up around the house, and broke two doors and every window on the second floor except one in order to let in air, said Fetik. In addition, they broke part of the wall in the kitchen to make sure that the fire had not gotten inside the wall.
The fire was extinguished in less than 20 minutes, said Fetik. It left some damage to her kitchen furniture, but the greatest damage was from the firefighters' breaking the windows and doors, she said.
Meanwhile, Fetik's sister, who received Fetik's neighbor's message when she got home to her house on 165th Street shortly after 10 p.m., was frantically trying to find somebody to drive her to Fetik's house because her own car did not have enough gasoline to make the trip.
“I was screaming. I woke up everyone in my neighborhood screaming,” said Emilie Fetik. “The neighbor left a very scary message.”
Since she could not find anybody to drive her to Rego Park, Emilie Fetik, who was with her brother, walked 1 1/2 hours from Fresh Meadows to Fetik's house.
“Queens looked like a war zone,” said Emilie Fetik. “It was dark out, everyone was frightened. We saw the police at intersections with all the flares.”
Once she reached Fetik's house, Emilie Fetik was relieved to find her sister unharmed, and spent a while talking to her about what had happened.
Fetik said she left her house around 4 p.m. to go to work in Flushing, where she teaches accounting at a two-year college. She caught the local subway train from the Woodhaven Boulevard station, and was heading towards the No. 7 train station on Roosevelt Avenue in Jackson Heights when the power went out and the train stopped in the middle of a tunnel.
“We didn't know what had happened. They told us there was a power outage in the subways, and to be patient, and then 10 minutes later they told us there was a citywide blackout,” said Fetik.
About an hour and a half later, Fetik and about 200 other people who were on the train left from the front of the train and began walking single file in the dark on an approximately 15-inch-wide ledge towards the Grand Avenue subway platform, said Fetik.
It took about 10 minutes of walking to reach the Grand Avenue station, and when she emerged onto the street, it was still light out, said Fetik.
Fetik then asked people what was going on, and stopped at a hardware store to buy a transistor radio and batteries before heading home along Queens Boulevard.
“I was exhausted. I had my flashlight, I set up some candles in the kitchen on plates and I went upstairs just to lay down and I fell asleep,” said Fetik.
Loughran said candles, including birthday candles and scented candles, are normally a large cause of fires. They are especially risky when people have pets, he said.
On the night of the blackout, about 1,000 extra firefighters were deployed from 6 p.m. to 9 a.m., said Loughran, many of whom responded to the 800 elevator rescues that occurred throughout the night, in addition to fires.
Both Fetik and her sister, who eventually paid a man in a car $20 to take her home to Fresh Meadows at around 3 a.m. Friday, blamed Con Edison for the fire.
“I would like to get some assistance,” said Fetik, who stayed in her house after the fire was extinguished because she was afraid that someone might climb in through the broken doors or windows to rob the house. “I'm going to try to hold Con Ed and the government responsible for the damage that we have.”
Reach reporter Tien-Shun Lee by email at Timesledger@aol.com, or call 718-229-0300, Ext. 155.
