SILVERDALE — Dylan Lapinski says it was a matter of being at the right place at the right time when he alerted Dawn Ruth that her home was on fire. For her, it was much more than that.
“I owe him a debt of gratitude I can never repay,” Ruth, 68, said of Lapinski, a Master Chief Petty Officer on the USS Pennsylvania.
On Wednesday morning Lapinski was dropping his son off at Central Kitsap High School around 7 a.m. on his way to work when he smelled something burning.
“Submarining for as long as I have been, you know that smell,” Lapinski said. He thought it was his truck at first, but the smell faded as he dropped his son off at school. As he turned back onto Frontier Place NW, the smell returned. He said he knew something was wrong.
He pulled off into a driveway to investigate and found a fire climbing up the post of Ruth’s deck on the back of the home.
“As I was calling 911 her smoke alarm started going off and I started pounding on her door because the size of the fire wasn’t going to get put out by a garden hose,” Lapinski said.
Though Lapinski knows how to corral fires as part of his Navy training, this fire was burning big fast, and his priority was getting whoever was in the house out.
Lapinski alerted the neighbors to get out of their homes, which had propane tanks in the backyard, to prevent shrapnel or have flames spread to another occupied house.
Next, he stopped the incoming high school traffic — the road was getting busy — to make room for the fire engines that were on their way. As fire crews and sheriff's deputies arrived, Lapinski headed back up to the school to talk to Ruth and retrieve the jacket he let her borrow.
“He’s a wonderful human being who cared about someone else enough to put himself out and he gave me his jacket because I was freezing yesterday,” Ruth said. “I was so cold and scared and he made sure I was safe.”
The two reunited Thursday at Central Kitsap Fire and Rescue Station 51 in Silverdale, where Ruth thanked Lapinski for saving her life. She gripped his hand as she sobbed and expressed her gratitude for both his service in the military and for his off-duty service to her.
“They go into military service to lay their lives on the line for people and he went above and beyond to save my life,” she said.
Ruth’s husband, who was out of town during the fire, is retired from the Navy. All the memorabilia from his service, a flag and other keepsakes, were burned in the fire. Lapinski presented Ruth with a “challenge coin” — a token of honor and remembrance used as a gift in the Navy — and told her it could be a start to rebuild what they lost. The coin has Lapinski’s command crest and name along with the ship’s crest and name inscribed on it.
Ruth is staying positive. She said her and her husband’s lives will improve in ways they don’t even know yet because of the fire. The house needed a new roof, carpet and dishwasher, and now she has the opportunity to “start fresh,” she said.
“Through all of this, I’ve had friends coming out of the woodwork to support me," she said. "It’s just amazing, the community, I’m blessed to live here. I love Kitsap.”
She came to the fire station Thursday in clothes donated by her friends, and the slippers she wore during her escape from the fire Wednesday. She said there’s still soot under her fingernails.
“Some of it’s still a blur. I’m still pretty numb from it,” she said.
Lapinski said fighting a house fire is a bit different than a submarine fire.
“You have about two minutes to put a fire out because if you don’t get it out and it grows that smoke and heat is not going anywhere, it’s staying inside in the submarine,” Lapinski said. “Whereas in a house, at least the smoke is dissipating out windows or into the air. We don’t get that option, so very quickly we can be overcome by smoke. You can’t see, it can become very dangerous very quickly.”
He said sailors aren’t firefighters quite in the way that the Central Kitsap Fire and Rescue crew are, but as a chief on a submarine he trains his crew on combating fire and flooding casualties. They have the same firefighting ensembles, helmets and boots, as firefighters on land.
“We respond to a casualty instead of away from one. It’s natural for all the submarine force. We see a fire and we go to the fire to get it out,” Lapinski said.
Ruth is also grateful for the fire department, and like the Navy, has personal experiences that only increase her thankfulness to them.
“I can’t say enough about the fire service. They were my family for six and a half years when I worked for the Tacoma fire service,” she said. “Military and fire and law enforcement — they’re all out there so we can enjoy our ways of life that we have here.”
The call for the fire came in at 7:02 a.m., and the fire was under control by 8 a.m. Hot spots continued to flare up for a few more hours, said Ileana LiMarzi, public information officer for Central Kitsap Fire and Rescue.
The cause of the fire has not been determined, but it originated near a stored motorcycle and space heater under the rear deck of the house.