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A CARMEL Highlands resident whose home caught fire early Tuesday morning has the neighbor’s dog to thank for the fact it didn’t completely burn down or spread to other
houses. Causey, a border collie who belongs to Corona Road resident Robert Conat, barked and woke up her owner around 2:30 a.m. Nov. 10.
“I looked out the window, and I could see a glow from the neighbor’s house,” he said Thursday. “I thought, ‘Oh my God, I think the neighbor’s house is on fire!’”
Conat, a photographer who also runs the Carmel Highlands General Store and gas station, grabbed the phone to call 911 and ran outside, where he saw his neighbor, Deborah Cowsill, coming up the driveway.
“She said her house was on fire,” he said. “I grabbed my hose and broke through the fence and sprayed the window, which shattered.” He quickly doused the flames.
Cowsill said she was awakened by the fire.
“It was very scary, and I don’t really know how I woke up. It sounded like something was scratching on my window,” she said.
Coughing, eyes burning and unable to see in the thick smoke and darkness, she felt her way to the door, paused briefly before opening it because she was worried the fresh air would fan the flames, and then realized it was her only way out.
“But I had to run back in and grab my phone,” she said. The landline was in the room that was on fire, so she got her cell phone, but poor reception kept cutting her off from the 911 operator. She first ran to one neighbor’s house and pounded on the door, but no one answered.
Cowsill was running toward Conat’s when he and Causey — his dog alarm — appeared.
By the time firefighters arrived, he had already doused the blaze with the garden hose, he said.
“We were lucky. I was afraid my neighbors’ houses were going to catch fire,” Cowsill commented.
Cowsill rents the home on Corona and doesn’t know how long the fire, which she thinks was started by a votive candle she had forgotten to extinguish, had been burning before she woke up.
“My hair and clothes and skin were all gray,” she said, from the smoke and ash. “There is a smoke detector, but it didn’t go off.”
In addition to Conat and Causey, the Monterey Bay Area chapter of the American Red Cross came to her aid that night. Cowsill said the Red Cross has put her up in hotels this week,
while she finds a place to stay. She has yet to reenter the Corona Road house to see what belongings she can salvage.
Meanwhile, Conat said his 8-year-old border collie, whom he rescued as a sickly, flea-bitten puppy after she and more than a half-dozen others crawled out from underneath a Bakersfield
house he was considering buying, will be available to sign autographs on weekends.
“She’s a great dog,” he said. “She’s like a neighborhood dog,” and residents in the area will visit and bring her treats. (Conat named her after the real estate broker who was showing him the property.)
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