Canby area youth credited for recent dramatic fire rescue

(Editor’s note: Kyle Kack is a member of the Church of St. Peter in Canby and participated in the recent National Catholic Youth Conference in Atlanta, GA.)

A chain of events that began last summer led to the saving of a life and possibly the property of others in Porter, MN early the morning of February 3. Two Canby High School students coming home from a basketball game saved a man's life and called for help before gusty winds could fan a smokey fire in a truck repair shop into open flames and blowing embers, the Porter fire chief said.

It was not only a chain of events - things like taking a different route home - but common sense that makes the story a good one, especially for the life that was in jeopardy when junior Kyle Kack and senior Jesse Schlecht discovered the fire.

"I don't think he could have survived more than a minute or two longer," said Chief Patrick Vlaminck, referring to Dave Prellwitz. "Also, if we hadn't gotten the alarm and been here before the building was fully engulfed, it could have spread to a couple houses across the street."

The fire call came from Kack as Schlecht was helping Prellwitz the rest of the way to safety. Vlaminck said Prellwitz was disoriented and suffered smoke inhalation and burns on his legs. The chief said the cause was apparently a wood burning stove in the shop owned by Raymond Petersen, who was out of the state on vacation. Schlecht said the two boys came through Porter shortly after midnight on their way home from a girls basketball game at Kerkhoven and saw smoke. "The whole town was filled with smoke. From where the smoke was coming from we thought it might be Petersen's shop," said Kack. "We swung over there and checked it out." He said they yelled to see if anyone was inside."We heard somebody yell back 'I'm in here'," said Schlecht.

"I asked if it was Dave and he said it was. Schlecht said they told Prellwitz to get out and he said he couldn't see.

"The smoke was really thick," Kack said.

"We could barely see him in the smoke (against the flames on the other side of him) just standing there and he wouldn't move," Kack said. "We yelled at him to get down on the floor. He was just standing up," Schlecht said.

Kack said they kept yelling and told Prellwitz to follow their voices and finally he began to crawl. "We saw him and went and grabbed him when he got close enough," Kack said. As Prellwitz made it the rest of the way to safety, Kack called 911 for help and the Porter Fire Department was on its way.

Prellwitz was in Kack's pickup when firemen and Porter First Responders arrived. "His whole face was all black and it looked like his legs were burned," Schlecht said.

Prellwitz told firemen he got out, but had gone back in to get the dog. He couldn't find him and discovered he could not see to get back out.

The two boys said they didn't try to go inside the building because they had been around the shop and knew there were combustible materials, like welding tanks and solvents, that could explode. "I was thinking about those welding tanks," said Kack.

The two recalled the early morning events as they sat in Principal Robert Slaba's office at Canby High School later that morning. "I just think you were somehow meant to be there," said Slaba, after he learned the reason the two had gone to an out of town game on a school night knowing it would be late when they got home.

"I met these girls at the National Catholic Youth Conference in Atlanta (Ga.) last summer and I had told them we'd be at the game," Kack said. "We stopped and talked to them for a while after the game."

The two said they also chose a slightly different road to come home on that seemed like it might be a little quicker late at night, which brought them into Porter.

The chief said Prellwitz’s burns were not as serious as they could have been. He said the immediate problem when the boys arrived was that Prellwitz was running out of oxygen. "They showed some really good common sense in how they helped him," the chief said, explaining that it could have been a fatal mistake for them to try to go inside the burning building because they would have found themselves surrounded by smoke and unable to find a way out.

courtesy of Canby News

Don Beman, writer