Shocked community ‘shaken to the bone’ after woman dies in Cambria house fire

A house fire in Cambria early Saturday, Oct. 21, has left a woman dead and a sorrowful community in shock.

The fire was reported just after midnight. Firefighters contained the blaze to the top story of the small pink house on the 2400 block of Leona Drive, according to fire officials and neighbors.

At 10:25 a.m. Wednesday, Oct. 25, sheriff’s spokesman Tony Cipolla confirmed that the woman who died in the fire was Beverley Abbey, 71. The coroner completed her autopsy Wednesday. Others have described her as a senior citizen on oxygen who loved books and lived alone in the rental home she’d occupied for about seven months, according to neighbor Victoria Greene and various officials.

Midday Tuesday, Oct. 24, fire officials were still investigating how the blaze began, and the coroner’s office hadn’t yet released the results of an autopsy performed on the victim.

Abbey used to work at Coalesce Book Store & Garden Wedding Chapel in Morro Bay, and who was the former owner of a used bookstore in the same city.

Joanne Hand, Coalesce assistant manager, said Tuesday that family members had told them that Abbey had died suddenly. Hand called Abbey “a wonderful co-worker. She’ll be greatly missed. We’re so shocked.”

Hand said Abbey was “a joy to work with” and great role model, a mother and grandmother, a former flight attendant and retired RN who was very active in the political and volunteering arenas.

“She was very knowledgeable,” Hand said. “She enjoyed the public, was an avid reader and was always able to give wonderful recommendations to customers about something to read.”

The scene

People walking past the home now might not realize that such a tragedy had happened there. Damage, confined to the second story of the home, isn’t evident from Leona Drive or from most of the homes in the neighborhood. On Tuesday, the frame around the home’s front door is a little singed, and there’s a broken window on the side of the house.

“Her shiny car is still in the driveway, and there’s so little evidence” of what happened, and what could have happened, Greene said.

The dark-of-night incident could have been much worse if Greene hadn’t changed her usual routines and listened to her instincts.

It was a classic example of someone paying attention to a subtle sixth sense that something might be wrong and then doing something about it quickly.

Officials say Greene’s instinct, reaction and subsequent actions — along with those of others who called firefighters — may have prevented a major conflagration in the coastal town in which thousands of homes are laced through an aging forest that includes many dying trees.

“I’m shaken to the bone, still,” the shy Greene said in a phone interview Tuesday. “We’re all just jammed together in this forest of dried everything. It’s frightening … how it could have ignited everything in an instant.”

What happened

“I was up late, watching a movie we’d rented,” Green said. Her husband had gone to bed earlier.

After the long film ended and she turned out the lights, Greene did “something I never do. Before I went to bed, something told me to look through the center glass doors we have, and then look up.

She said, “Up and above in the window next door, I saw, almost like a hologram, roiling golden orange. Not flames yet, just orange and movement … I felt like I could reach out and touch it.

“I screamed for my husband,” Richard Greene, who “got up and ran outside.” By then, flames were shooting out the window, 4 to 5 feet high. “We unfurled the hose. He put on the power nozzle, then ran upstairs by my art studio and began shooting water through the window” toward the flames that already were licking at the oak tree that overhangs their neighbor’s house.

Meanwhile, his wife had called 911 and was standing outside screaming, “Help! Fire!”

By then, the fire “was so monstrous, going straight out in the air, wanting to lash out and destroy everything,” she said. “It looked so mythical to me, how it was so alive and so furious. I guess I’ve just never been that close to out-of-control flames. It will chill me for the rest of my life.”

Response

According to Cambria Fire Department records, sheriff’s deputies who happened to be in town also heard the callout at 12:25 a.m. Saturday, and they got to the scene first, with the fire engine arriving at 12:32 a.m. According to Cambria Fire Chief William Hollingsworth, other departments responded under mutual-aid agreements, such as Cayucos and Morro Bay fire departments and various Cal Fire units.

Because Victoria Greene had told dispatchers that someone likely was in the house, the deputies (Jacob Gersh and Ian Doughty, according to Cipolla) went inside and found the unconscious woman “at the bottom of the stairs, just a few feet from where they were at the door,” according to Fire Department personnel.

The deputies quickly brought her out of the house and performed CPR but were unable to revive her.

The victim

Later, the Greenes compiled some clues, but to what, they don’t yet know.

A carpenter who is building a fence for them told them that, about 5 p.m. the day before the fire, two people went to the woman’s door twice, and that one of them may have been a doctor or nurse, because “he was wearing a white coat and carrying a black bag.” The neighbor apparently “never answered the door.”

In retrospect, Richard Greene recalled that the house had “been quiet all day,” unusual for a residence occupied by someone who had a TV on most of the time. When Victoria Greene said that maybe the neighbor had gone out or gone away, her husband replied, “But with all the windows open?”

Haunting

The tragedy “will haunt me,” Greene said.

She feels that, because of where the fire was in the back of the house, nobody else in the neighborhood would have seen the blaze until it was much larger, and possibly had ignited trees and other nearby homes.

That would include the close-by Greene house, with her studio adjacent to the fire area, a studio that’s filled with oil paintings, paint, turpentine and other flammables.

“Why I looked up that night, I don’t know,” she said. “I remembered later that I’d heard a noise,” nothing loud or disturbing, just a soft popping that she’d have attributed to some of the neighborhood wildlife poking around, such as raccoons, skunks and possums.

“I’ve thought about this so much” since the fire, Greene said. “Something must have been saying to me ‘this isn’t a sound you’ve heard before.’”

It wasn’t until later that the sounds got more intense and frightening, “loud explosions making huge blasts of fire, like a volcano.”

But, Greene said Tuesday as she looked out into her garden covered in burned pages of her neighbor’s beloved books, “could I have done more? Could I have helped?”

Her friend Marnie Stanfield doesn’t think so. “I think she and her husband are heroes,” she said Monday. “They saved Cambria.”

This story was originally published October 25, 2017 at 11:06 AM with the headline "Shocked community ‘shaken to the bone’ after woman dies in Cambria house fire."