LAKEPORT — Five minutes, and it was over.
Former Kelseyville High School star athlete Mike Davis and fiance Lindsey McQuade watched their Lakeport home of two years burn to the ground the night of Feb. 27. They lost all of their worldly possessions except what they were wearing. Just like that.
“That was the longest five minutes I’ve ever been a part of, time just seemed to stop,” said Davis, a 2011 Kelseyville High School graduate, of the period between when the original 911 call was placed by one of his friends to the Lakeport Fire Department to when units arrived at the scene. “They got there fast, but there wasn’t much they could do (to save the house),” Davis said. “By the time they arrived most of the house was fully engulfed.”
While the cause of the blaze that gutted their Mellor Drive home is still under investigation, Davis said the fire appeared to start near an electrical panel on the outside of the home. “On the other side of the wall from our bedroom,” Davis said. That part of the house was long gone by the time firefighters were on the scene.
Fortunately neither Davis or McQuade, who will be married May 29 in Lakeport, were in the bedroom at the time. Davis was outside on his deck, the opposite side of the house from where the fire broke out, entertaining some friends. McQuade was asleep on the living room couch. Davis’ nephew, Nicholas Williamson, was asleep in his room on the other side of the house from the fire ignition point.
At the first sign of fire, Davis said he rushed inside to wake up Lindsey and his nephew and escort them safely from the house. As his friends called 911 to alert the fire department, Davis tried to douse the fire with a garden hose but the fire continued to grow in size.
“Seventy-five percent of our house was gone in like two minutes,” Davis said.
“I ran out with what I had on, no shoes,” said McQuade, a Burney native who is employed in the human performance department at Adventist Health in Ukiah. “Mike had to give me a pair of his shoes. I didn’t even have time to get my cell phone.”
Together for five years, Davis and McQuade said their Lakeport home, which they saved many years to purchase, was perfect for them and a work in progress.
“We wanted to update it and we were,” McQuade said of various home improvement projects.
While the home was fully insured and they plan to rebuild on the site, Davis and McQuade were left homeless in an instant and without anything but what they were wearing the night of the fire. They are now staying at a friend’s home in Scotts Valley, recovering from the considerable trauma that is not even two weeks old.
Some things they’ll never be able to replace, unfortunately.
“I lost my dad’s urn, a lot of pictures,” Davis said. “My dad died in 2018 and Lindsey lost her great-grandmother just a month ago.”
“We have not been through an easy stretch lately,” McQuade added.
There was at least one small miracle, according to McQuade. Her wedding dress, originally reported as lost to the fire, according to online accounts at the time of the fire, is safe and sound, as her mother picked it up to make alterations shortly before the fire took place.
Community members, both in Kelseyville and in McQuade’s Shasta County hometown, also have rallied to the couple’s assistance.
“Absolutely amazing,” McQuade said. “I can’t believe this community (Kelseyville) and it’s been the same in Burney … I’ve received so many cards and texts.”
“When you come from a small town,” said Davis, a salesman at Thurston Honda in Ukiah, “you see what a community does in times like this and you treasure that. I hope that this never happens to anyone else, but I hope we can do the same thing for someone else when it does.”
Offers of clothing and other items have poured in. A GoFundMe account for the couple has raised almost $8,000. Closer to home, Lyndall’s Sport Stop Grill in Kelseyville held a fundraiser Saturday hoping to match or top the amount of money raised by the GoFundMe account, or at least that was the goal of Mike Lyndall, owner of the restaurant and a longtime supporter of all things Kelseyville, and especially high school sports.
“We wanted to see if we could raise more than that,” Lyndall said. “All the money we made on Saturday (at the restaurant) we donated to them along with all the money from a donation jar (at the business),” Lyndall said.
And so it came to pass on Monday that Lyndall presented Davis and McQuade with a check for $8,145 to help get them back on their feet.
“I have a lot of family here besides blood that I consider to be a part of and the Lyndalls are on that list,” Davis said.
Davis and McQuade said the experience, as awful as the fire was, will make their relationship stronger in the end. They are not backing off on their wedding plans for May 29,
“We’re not stopping anything,” McQuade said. “You can choose to be sad or mad or you can choose to be happy and move on, and that’s what we are going to do.”
And both said they are just thankful to be alive and well.
“It could have been so much worse,” Davis said of the fire. “But no one was hurt.”
“When the fire was burning our home, there was nothing we could do, you’re helpless and we could only watch,” McQuade said. “But then Mike grabs me and said we have each other.
“In the long run that’s all that matters.”
