There’s no reason 19-year-old Andreya Uppal should have gone back to check on her little brother Liam before going out with a friend in the wee hours of the morning last Monday.
The six-year-old had fallen asleep in her room in the bottom floor of their 10th Avenue Burnaby home.
By the time she looked back in on him, a line of flames was beginning to catch at the bedcovers while her brother slept.
“A minute later, he would have been on fire, completely on fire,” Andreya’s mother, Maria Uppal told the NOW. “It was just by the grace of God that she came back into the room and checked in on him.”
Andreya grabbed the boy, Maria said, and then banged on the doors of two international students staying in the home.
Shoeless and wearing only pajamas, the four made their way upstairs through blinding smoke.
But at the back door, there was a moment of panic.
“I had a child safety lock on the door that I’d put in when the kids were young,” Maria said. “She said that they couldn’t open it and they started to panic.”
After frantically scratching at the door for moment, Andreya collected herself and managed to open it.
Smoke alarms were going off by this time, but Maria said she didn’t hear anything.
“It was her scream that woke me up at this point,” Maria said. “It was that screaming that you will just never forget – ‘Mom! Mom! Mom!’”
Maria jumped out of bed and grabbed her nine-year old son, Matias, who had been sleeping with her, but the smoke was already so thick by the time she got to the door that she couldn’t see her daughter, she said.
Afraid of a possible natural gas explosion, Maria told everyone to get out and away from the house.
She then went back in – into the furthest room in the house – to get her 66-year-old mother, who had recently had knee-replacement surgery.
“I’ll never forget,” Maria said. “My couch had, I kid you not, flames that were four feet high coming out of it,” Maria said. “It just went up like kindling. This was the one right above Andreya’s room. … and what was really scary is also things started blowing up. I did not know this about a fire. Things were blowing up left, right and centre, like my mirrors. Things were popping as I was walking through.”
Maria tried to go back into the house again after her mother was safe to try to retrieve the family’s 14-week-old kitten, Max, and a cell phone to call 911, but the blaze was too intense.
Watching his mother try to go back into the burning building a second time, was too much for her son, Matias, Maria said.
“My student caught him because he couldn’t be there,” Maria said. “He started running down the street. He just had to get away.”
The family and the two international students were taken to hospital and treated for smoke inhalation.
They were released later that morning.
The international students, a Chinese student who attends New Westminster secondary and a Brazilian student who attends Burnaby South (and had been in Canada for less than two weeks), were placed with new families that night.
Maria’s family, meanwhile, has lost everything.
“The things that I’m so sad about are my kids’ stuff,” she said. “My daughter will be 20 on March 11, and I had photo albums of her – this is pre-digital age – and those are all gone. I don’t have any of her now when she was a baby; my kids’ drawings; the mugs that I had in my kitchen – I went with a friend to buy them; clothes from all the children – I had saved their baptism clothing; and, for the boys, their kitten. I feel so sad for our little kitten.”
In the immediate aftermath of the fire, however, Maria had to push those thoughts aside to deal with more immediate challenges – getting her kids into a hotel, buying clothes.
“I was wearing my hospital pants for three days,” Maria said.
Though she has gotten few answers so far from the fire department or from her insurance company, Maria expects her house will have to be rebuilt, and it will take at least a year before the family can move back in.
She has recently secured a place to rent in Burnaby, close enough for the boys to keep going to their school, Second Street Elementary.
But rebuilding from scratch is going to be hard for the single mom, so friends have stepped up.
A GoFundMe page (http://tinyurl.com/MariaUppal) has already raised more than $10,000.
In the past, Maria said she couldn’t imagine being that mom that warns people about emergency planning, but her family’s tragedy, which could have been so much worse, has changed all that.
“What I’m telling everybody is ‘Do your fire safety with your children and do it in the dark at night because you won’t be able to see.’”
