N.S. mother and kids recall harrowing escape from house fire, thankful for community support
Global News
"I was breaking open the window and telling the kids, 'We got to jump! We're going to die or we got to jump!'"
A Nova Scotia family is counting their blessings especially this Thanksgiving, as their community rallies to help them after their harrowing escape from a house fire.
Heather Hepburn and her three children were asleep at around 5 a.m. last Tuesday, when the blaze broke out at their two-storey house in Debert, N.S.
Heather’s husband, who happens to be a volunteer firefighter with the Debert station, was at work at the time.
When the smoke detector went off, Heather was the only one who heard it.
“I started screaming, ‘fire!’ to wake up the kids because of course, they all slept through the fire alarm,” she recalled.
“They tried to go downstairs for a minute and then they came back up because the fire was at the bottom of our stairs. So we were trapped upstairs.”
Heather said she ushered her children — a seven-year-old boy, and two girls aged 14 and 17 — into her son’s room. They closed the door and while she frantically made a 911 call, the family was forced to make a quick life-or-death decision.
“And at that point, the smoke and the heat — the heat scared me the most. When you feel the heat pouring into the room. Just terrifying,” she said.