(KCAW Photo/Justin and Shannon Elmquist)
Shannon Elmquist moved to Sitka earlier this month to be closer to her family and new grandson.
“My youngest son, Justin Elmquist road tripped with me from Gardnerville, Nevada,” Elmquist said in an interview with KCAW on Thursday (7-24-25). “We caught the ferry in Bellingham, Washington, and arrived [in Sitka] on the 14th of July.”
Shannon and Justin made a lot of memories on their long drive, taking plenty of silly selfies along the way to commemorate the journey. But Justin, a recent high school graduate, won’t need a selfie to remember the most unusual part of his capstone summer vacation– fighting an active house fire.
They were pulling into their driveway after a family trip to the Raptor Center. That’s when Shannon said her daughter-in-law smelled something unusual.
“She says ‘It smells like trash, like they’re burning trash.’ And Justin’s like, ‘Well, let’s go to the end of the road…and check it out'” Shannon recalled.
“Yeah, being snoopy,” Justin added.
They saw smoke ahead, so they drove down Andrew Hope Street and found the source– a single story duplex with fire creeping up its side.
“I don’t even think I got the truck in park, and he was already out the door,” Shannon said. “I was running out the door. We started banging on the doors and the windows not getting any response.”
“I wasn’t really thinking, it was like, ‘Holy crap! We’ve got to get those people out of there,” Justin said.
They caught the attention of the woman in the opposite duplex unit, and through the window she directed them to a garden hose. Shannon ran to grab the hose, and Justin turned it on. Shannon says that’s when they learned that someone was home in the burning duplex unit.
“So he takes over, and he’s putting out the fire and I run into the house,” Shannon said.
Inside, she found a sleeping woman and her 18-month-old baby.
“I just opened the door and went in, and I was like, ‘your house is on fire!'” Shannon said.
She helped the pair out of the house. The fire department arrived shortly after Justin had extinguished the fire, and Fire Chief Craig Warren said they were able to cancel their call for a fire engine. Warren says the house had vinyl siding, which tends to burn fast and hot.
“Little bit of charring on the edge of the porch, but, all in all, it was very low damage,” Warren said.
He said the source of the fire is still under investigation– he doesn’t believe it was caused by negligence. But he said quick thinking prevented the situation from being much worse.
“The reason that we have extinguishers staged everywhere is because you get ahold of a fire when it’s very small, and it’s easy to contain,” Warren said. “When you get a fire in a house, and it’s taking a whole room, that garden hose isn’t going to be able to put that much fire out.”
Justin is training to be a professional mixed martial arts fighter. He thinks those skills steadied him in a moment of crisis.
“With fighting…we have to keep a level head and all that, through people throwing punches and kicks at your head, or especially through Jiu Jitsu, when you get frustrated in certain positions,” Justin said. “Just keeping a level head through everything. And so that definitely did help in the firefighting.”
With everyone safe and the fire contained, Shannon and Justin celebrated with a few high fives and fist bumps, then went home for dinner. But Shannon kept playing over the scenario in her head.
“Just the whole divine intervention, like, had we not come home when we did that fire would have gotten so much bigger, and nobody would have noticed,” she said.
Warren hopes like the mother-son pair, Sitkans will remember to stay aware of what’s happening in their neighborhoods, and maybe help a neighbor out.
“Justin and Shannon are really the heroes of the day,” Warren said. “Truly another great story of Sitkans helping Sitkans.”
