Three Escape Blaze With Seconds to Spare

When Jerry Sheehan, a former chief of the Springs Fire Department, ran to his neighbor’s house at 787 Accabonac Road in the dark early Saturday morning, flames were shooting 30 feet into the air through its roof. The fire seemed to be in one part of the house, but he knew all too well that the smoke inside would be deadly.

Facing the house, he didn’t notice at first that Judi Bistrian and her 11-year-old daughter, Violet, and 4-year-old son, Roman, were huddled near a detached garage. Ms. Bistrian said later that when she called out to him she could tell by the look on his face and the tone of his voice that he had thought the worst. “I’m sure his first thought was, ‘They’re gone.’ ”

She was right. “I figured they were still sleeping and the smoke got to them,” Mr. Sheehan said. He was prepared to go inside and search for them, he said, explaining that he knew the layout of the 100-year-old house because it once belonged to his mother. “Thank God, I didn’t have to,” he said. The entire house was engulfed in a matter of minutes.

Ms. Bistrian had rescued her children, two pets, and a bantam chicken moments earlier, “with seconds to spare before the windows started exploding,” she said. Several circumstances were in her favor. Her husband, Rob Bistrian, the captain of a commercial fishing boat, was out to sea for the third night, and when he is away she tends to sleep with her children in a queen-size bed on the first floor, instead of putting them to bed in their own rooms on the second floor. Their chocolate Lab has a tumor in his throat and suffers breathing problems, so she had taken him and their small dog into the bedroom and closed the door so he would breathe easier in air-conditioning.

Despite having a bad sense of smell, Ms. Bistrian awoke to feel her nostrils burning. Looking for the source, she said, “I walked into a wall of smoke in the kitchen. I thought I was having a puffback. There was black smoke coming from the mudroom.” She opened the door to the room, which investigators described as an enclosed porch, to see thick black smoke and hear a crackling sound. “That’s when I knew the house was on fire,” she said.

She then slammed the mudroom door shut, a move that Tom Baker, the East Hampton Town fire marshal, said bought her time. “That was the real life-saver,” he said Tuesday. “Had she not closed the door, it would have rapidly tore through the house.” 

Ms. Bistrian went into the bedroom and awakened her daughter, who grabbed Bella, a Jack Russell-Chihuahua mix that had been sleeping in the bed, and she grabbed her son. They went out a sliding glass door onto the deck. She then went back into the house to lead the old, 170-pound Lab, Zeke, outside. With the house phone no longer working, she went back inside, got her cellphone, and called 911. It was about 4:20 a.m.

After hanging up, she remembered that one of the bantams, which was being kept separate from those in the coop, was in the house, just a few steps from the sliding door. She said she went through “black, black smoke” to grab the rabbit cage it was in. “That’s when the windows started exploding. Flames were everywhere,” she said. A cat, named Sammy, which had recently been adopted, was killed in the fire.

“It’s quite a miracle we’re alive,” Ms. Bistrian said. “If we would have slept 10 seconds longer, I wouldn’t be talking to you right now.” She did not escape entirely unscathed, however. She and the children were taken to Southampton Hospital for possible smoke inhalation. The children were given some oxygen and quickly released, but she was admitted, treated with oxygen therapy, and  kept under observation until that afternoon.

Ms. Bistrian’s mother, Peggy Miller, also feared the worst after she learned of the fire — over the Springs Fire Department pager. She has been a volunteer for 10 years, and her husband, Chuck Miller, has been a member for more than 40. They drove to the house to see it engulfed. “She got out of the car and ran into the yard area and basically was screaming, ‘They are all dead,’ ” her daughter said. “She has laryngitis from screaming so much.”

David King, the Fire Department’s first assistant chief, said the fire took 30 to 40 minutes to fully extinguish, and that firefighters stayed at the scene for about two hours. About 75 firefighters had responded. Springs received assistance from the Amagansett, East Hampton, and Sag Harbor Fire Departments and the East Hampton Village Volunteer Ambulance Association helped assess firefighters’ conditions. An Amagansett volunteer was taken to Southampton Hospital as a precaution and was released by mid-morning.

Ms. Bistrian said she was stunned to learn during her hospital stay that the family’s two pet turtles survived in their tank on the second floor.

Allen Bennett, Amagansett’s first assistant chief, said P.J. Cantwell, an ex-fire chief, and Chris Beckert, an assistant captain, both with Amagansett, had discovered the aquatic turtles still alive with the bigger one, about 12-inches in diameter, on top of the smaller one, and they weren’t particularly pleasant when the firemen handled them. “They were hissing. They were mean,” Mr. Bennett said with a laugh. The firemen found a container and cooled them down with water.

With the house they lived in for 13 years destroyed, the Bistrians are staying at Ms. Bistrian’s mother’s house in Springs. “We lost every single thing we owned and we escaped in our pajamas and our bare feet,” she said. Her daughter is handling it well, but her son is taking it harder, she said. “He keeps asking, ‘When can we go home?’ ”

The children are in seventh grade and pre-kindergarten and are home-schooled. Ms. Bistrian is working with an East Hampton home-schooling group to replace their materials and books.

“I am not sad. I am not depressed. I am just thrilled to be alive and thrilled my children are alive and just in awe of my community,” Ms. Bistrian said.

The family has received countless donations of food, clothing, toys, books, and dog food. A fund-raiser will be held on Saturday at the Springs Firehouse from 4 to 7 p.m. Admission is $40.

Mr. Baker, in the fire marshal’s office, said yesterday that the fire began in the mudroom and was caused by wear on the dryer’s electrical cord. “We know it had been burning — we can’t pinpoint an exact time —  but quite a while,” he said. Though the machine was not turned on, it still draws electricity from the wall, and the cord was rubbing up against metal, which sparked the fire. A safeguard wasn’t in place, he said. “It was a simple mistake” made during installation in 2011, he said.

Meanwhile, out at sea, Mr. Bistrian had awakened in his bunk to a text message from Chris Parsons, from whom he and his wife had bought the house, asking if everyone was all right after the fire. He thought the message was a mistake. After trying to call home and finding the phone wasn’t working, he reached his mother-in-law and learned what had happened. Of his wife, he said, “I told her, she’s a hero. She saved everybody’s lives.” But Ms. Bistrian said she was uncomfortable being called hero.

“You act on instinct in a stressful situation like that,” she said. “I would hope and think that every single mother in the world would have done that. My mission was to get my babies out of there. I did what I had to do.”