Prior to January, if it had not been for their 2-year-old son Brandon, these parents say that they wouldn’t be alive today.
Toward the beginning of that day, Brandon woke his mother, Kayla Dahl, yelling “Momma, hot! Momma, hot!” she said. In light of that single sentence, the parents had barely any time to snatch their children and escape their consuming house safely.
“He saved our entire family,” Kayla Dahl said. “I mean, he’s our little mini hero. We had seconds, It’s nothing short of a miracle.”
Parents, Nathan and Kayla Dahl live in Alvord, Texas, which is about an hour northwest of Fort Worth. They have five children, including hero Brandon.
Everything began around 4:30 a.m. Saturday, Jan. 15, when a fire began in the home, one that would ultimately obliterate the entire structure.
Structure fires aren’t any stranger for Nathan Dahl since he’s been a voluntary fireman for the Alvord Fire Department for over 6 years. He said that he’s run practice drills with his children on what to do assuming that they need to escape the house rapidly and accentuated not to stress over grabbing anything on the way out.
Both the parents said they had lost their sense of smell and couldn’t smell anything of the smoke. To add to that, their smoke detectors didn’t go off until the fire had grown too large to get a hold of.
“We had brand new, less than a year old, smoke alarms in our house,” Nathan Dahl said. “None of them went off.” – well that’s just perfect, the things go off when you don’t want them to, but when you need them they don’t work.
Kayla awoke to Brandon hacking and conversing with her. That’s when she looked towards the room entryway and realized what was going on.
“I just saw the flames coming out of our of the living room and into our bedroom,” she said.
Immediately she woke up her husband.
“She’s screaming, ‘Fire! Fire! Fire!’” he said. “My initial thought was, ‘OK, I’m going to get up and I’m going to get to work.’”
However, Nathan wasn’t in his firefighting gear this time. Instead, he was in his pajamas, that’s when he changed his mind from fighting the now six foot tall flames to getting his family out alive.
“I was like, ‘Oh my God,’” he said. “My heart just dropped. In my head, I already knew this house was gone. We had to get out.”
The Dahl’s were able to make a quick escape thanks to the practices in less than a minute. Nathan mentioned that if it hadn’t been thanks to Brandon waking them up exactly when he did or if they moved any slower, things could have ended tragically.
“About maybe a minute after we got out of the house, our front door had flames coming out of it,” he said. “Everything was in flames.”
The parents quickly took a good look at their five children for wounds and burns. Other than some hairs that were singed on Brandon’s head, they were all fine, and alive.
Once on the scene, firemen believe that fire originated from the gas heater in the family room. Promptly after the family getting out, firemen from nine different local groups of fire-fighters and one EMS division were at the scene.
Unfortunately, the fireman couldn’t save the house, but the good news is they were able to keep it from spreading, and everyone’s alive.
The Dahl’s lost everything that wasn’t on their bodies when they ran out of their house. During the first week after the fire, the family remained close by at Kayla Dahl’s grandparents’ home. Her SUV along with Nathan’s truck were both destroyed with the flames as well.
“You hear individuals say, ‘I lost everything,’” Kayla said. “You don’t understand the heaviness of that until it happens to you.”
Only hours after the fire, one of Kayla’s closest friends began a GoFundMe page for them, one that has proactively outperformed the $5,000 goal.
“We’ve had an extremely, extremely blessed outpour of love and support,” Kayla said.
Since that point, Kayla said the greatest assistance her family has gotten is clothes to wear. The family likewise received books and toys for the kids as well as a tad bit of furniture for their next home. The children will be all ready to rest on beds received.
Others have created small events or donated in some different ways. The Alvord Fire Department for example, is attempting to assist with coordinating a fund raising dinner Tuesday night to assist with raising funds for the Dahls.
This story syndicated with permission from My Faith News
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