The Don and Carol Jilovec home in rural Mechanicsville burned down Friday, Dec. 23.
Carol said that she had just been getting ready to take a shower and had taken off her Fitbit watch at the dining room table at roughly 8 p.m.
“I caught an eerie glow in the bay window and was asking Don what it was, if it was a road grader coming by to take care of some of the drifts from the blizzard,” Jilovec said. “He looked at it and then up and realized that the house was on fire and we needed to get out of the home now.”
The couple grabbed coats, their phones and boots and headed for their vehicles, which were located near the house. Carol called 911 as they were leaving the home.
Their vehicles got stuck as the couple were trying to get away from the home, due to drifts from the ongoing blizzard, and they had to wait for first responders to arrive.
“By the time we were leaving the home, the smoke had grown so much thicker, but prior to that, we had almost no warning,” Jilovec said. “There had been no odor or anything that indicated a fire, and we had been upstairs in the home just a few minutes prior.”
The department was paged to the fire at 8:15 p.m., according to Mechanicsville fire chief Jacob Koch. By the time firefighters arrived on scene, the second floor of the house was pretty much engulfed in flames.
Battling the blaze was complicated for the fire department, as the temperatures that night were brutally cold. Because of the rural location of the home, the departments were battling drifts from the blizzard to get there.
“We were dealing with temperatures of -6 degrees Fahrenheit with 35 to 40 mile per hour winds,” Koch said. “We had hoses that were freezing up, trucks that were freezing up.”
Mutual aid was called after the Mechanicsville fire department arrived and got a look at the scope of the blaze.
Three counties -Jones, Linn and Cedar – all had crews that fought the fire. Fire departments who responded with mutual aid were Lisbon, Mount Vernon, Mechanicsville, Stanwood, Clarence, Olin, Marley and Martelle. Lisbon-Mount Vernon Ambulance and Stanwood Ambulance services were on standby, with LMVAS having to take a page in Jones County.
Koch said the brutal temperatures forced the departments to make sure firefighters were rotating back and forth from hoses into heated trucks every five to 10 minutes to limit their exposure.
By the time the firefighters arrived, the blaze’s intensity left it unsafe to send anyone in to the building to try and save anything.
“My husband asked if they were going to be able to save anything, and someone told him at that point, it was just the chimney that was holding the structure up,” Carol said. “Every thing else was gone.”
The fire is being investigated by the state fire marshal’s office.
“It just went up so quick,” Carol said. “We lived in the home for more than 50 years.”
Carol fell and broke her hip sometime between escaping the home and first responders arriving, which meant she had to have first responders carry her to the ambulance over the snow-covered ground. Both she and her husband also suffered cases of frostbite due to exposure in the subzero temperatures while they waited for first responders to arrive.
Still, Carol said the couple will persevere and carry on.
“We’ve had such an outpouring of support from our communities already,” Carol said. “It’s been so overwhelming. We’re not sure what we’ll need at the moment, maybe just some return to normalcy after our care has been taken care of.”
A fund has been set up for the Jilovec family at Mount Vernon Bank and Trust.
Koch said it was a reminder for anyone in eastern Iowa to check the batteries in smoke and carbon monoxide detectors, as there have been a string of house fires crews are responding to this winter.
“Make sure you aren’t overloading any circuits and check your heaters as well,” Koch said.
Koch said that the fire really reiterated the importance of many smaller fire departments working together.
“We train together and work together on a number of fires in these smaller communities,” Koch said. “When we’re getting gear like grain bin rescue equipment that other departments have, it’s so we have access to some of the same equipment in case theirs breaks on the scene, that we still have another set that can be used to help in the case of an emergency.”
It also highlighted why the upcoming radio upgrades in Cedar County will be a godsend to rural fire departments.
“That night, we were all on different radio channels,” Koch said. “That makes it harder to work together as departments. It would have been very hard if we were able to send people into a building to communicate with those inside the building if they weren’t on the same channel.”