DENVER - About 3:30 p.m. Tuesday, Angela Kircher and her 92-year-old mother Margery Kusulas were sitting in Margery's windowless bedroom, the Denver Post reports.
Margery was having trouble with her TV set and Angela was trying to fix the problem.
Unknown to the women, a fire was racing up the five acres of pasture at the back of the house a fire caused by sparks from a passing train.
"We had no windows in the bedroom. We couldn't see anything. We smelled nothing. We heard nothing. Knew nothing," said Angela Kircher .
The first indication that anything was wrong was when neighbor Terry Kemp came running into the house yelling, "Angie, get out! Smoke, smoke!"
"I looked out in the backyard and the back field was on fire," said Kircher.
Kircher said that when her mother heard Kemp, she got off the bed and started moving. "She was ready to go. Prior to the fire you couldn't set a bomb under her and move her out of that house," said Kircher chuckling. "But the day of the fire, yeah, she would have beaten me out had I not gotten out of there first."
Two police officers helped Margery Kusulas from the home.
"They both made sure she was out," Kircher said.
Kircher then ran to the side of the house where she opened the cat door for Margery's cat "Spooky." But as she did, she encountered flames reaching the sundeck. She retreated.
"That was when I knew for sure this thing was bad and we had to get out of there pronto because almost all the house is wood," she said.
Kircher said her mother "fell in love" with the house when she first saw it in the late 1940s.
Kusulas spent much of Wednesday at the site of the fire.
It has a magnificent panoramic view of the Front Range.
But Wednesday, it wasn't the view she was admiring.
She was looking at the burned out remains of her house and barn, where horses and donkeys were once stabled.
"It is an awful mess right now," said Kusulas.
Margery Kusulas has lived in the house, on one of the highest point in Arvada, since 1947.
In recent years, her sole companion has been Spooky, the cat.
And Tuesday, she lost both the house and Spooky, who she believes died in the fire.
Kusulas was philosophical.
"We expect these kinds of things to happen," she said. "We have to expect these things."
"I know it is for a cause," said Kusulas, who describes herself as a deeply religious woman. "The Lord will straighten this out for me."
Kusulas would like to temporarily move a mobile home on to the site and then build a small home.
Her biggest losses were Spooky and treasured family photographs.
Spooky and her were pals.
"We communicated and we enjoyed each other," she said of the cat, who was a stray when she first appeared. "I adopted her and she adopted me."
She said she wanted to go back and get the pictures but the two policemen had her by the arms and she was "just kind of floating along."
"I wanted to go back and grab my purse and some of the pictures, but there was no way. They said absolutely no," said Kusulas.
Scott Pribble, spokesman for the Arvada Fire Department, said the cause of the fire was sparks from a westbound Union Pacific train.
Union Pacific spokesman Mark Daviscq said the railroad's investigation is focused on the locomotive of a train that passed through the area Tuesday.
Davis said that the railroad is "reaching out to the property owners and trying to take care of them any way we can even as the investigation is continuing."
(This item appeared Feb. 25, 2009, in the Denver Post.)
