Bill Lucak, 60, is dead after an early morning house fire Saturday in the 500 block of Yale Street in Hope.
The Hope Fire Department received a call for a house on fire Oct. 27 at 6 a.m. After multiple attempts to enter the home while fighting the fire, crews located Bill Lucak, deceased, at 9 a.m.
Dagmar Lucak, Bill’s wife, made the call to the fire department. “(The) female occupant was on the phone, saying that her husband was still inside the house. When we arrived we had flames appearing through the roof,” said fire chief Tom DeSorcy.
Dagmar’s mother and father Hans and Helen Jeschek spoke with The Hope Standard about that morning. When they heard about the fire they quickly made the two-block drive from their home, arriving to many neighbours and firefighters at the scene.
Before fire crews arrived, both Dagmar and a neighbour, Warren Gardner, had entered the burning house to rescue Bill.
“She tried to pull him out but he said ‘there’s something in the way, I can’t get out I can’t get out’ and then she said she heard him breathing very heavily. He had a heart problem too. And then she had to get out. Three times, she said, she went back in to get him out,” said Helen. Dagmar escaped by crawling on her belly out the door.
Both Dagmar and Gardner were transported to hospital for smoke inhalation.
When firefighters arrived, a crew of 16 worked to gain entry to the house to conduct a search, with Bill still trapped inside.
“We were limited or obstructed in our efforts due to various unsafe conditions,” DeSorcy said. “We had a fire consuming the building, we had extreme smoke conditions, household debris in the building that made it difficult for us to gain entry. There were varying factors that made it difficult, if not impossible, to gain entry.”
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“We were just standing there waiting. They had a gurney ready, but they couldn’t rescue him,” Helen said. “So we stood there for about an hour and a half in the cold.”
Crews made several attempts to enter the home, attacking the fire and searching at the same time.
“Obvious experience says that there’s a very small window if a person is involved in that environment. (It) is certainly not capable of supporting life for very long with that dense amount of smoke and toxic gases,” DeSorcy said.
“I’m confident in the fact that nothing we could have done differently would have changed the situation.”
As Hope is a small town, many of the firefighters knew the family personally. DeSorcy said the team handled the situation well, acting with ‘respect and dignity’ during the rescue and when assisting the coroner in removing his body.
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DeSorcy confirmed there are no other occupants of the home or firefighters injured and no damage to nearby structures.
Multiple agencies were on scene including the BC Ambulance Service, RCMP, the BC Coroners Service, Fortis BC and BC Hydro. The coroner is now in the early stages of an investigation, communications manager Andy Watson confirmed via email.
Watson stated the investigation involved finding out how, where, when and by what means Lucak died.
“It’s not clear as to his actions. Was he stuck? Did he come out and go back in? We don’t know that information yet,” DeSorcy said.
The RCMP is not treating the fire as suspicious, DeSorcy added.
As for the cause of the fire, the fire department is still investigating. The Jeschek’s believe it could have been started by wiring in the ceiling of the ‘very old’ house, which is where the first flames were seen.
The man fire crews found dead was community member, artist and musician Bill Lucak. He was 60 years old and leaves behind his wife Dagmar, and children Ayla and Emry.
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The Jeschek’s spoke with the Hope Standard about their son-in-law Lucak, a man Helen described as “a very mellow guy, very helpful and friendly.” They had known Bill since he began seeing their daughter Dagmar, 34 years ago.
He shared a passion for music with his wife and son, Emry, Hans said. “He had a lot of guitars in that house and they all burned. Antique ones, his son told me. His son (Emry) is into music…and Dagmar is into music too. They went jamming everywhere,” he said.
Bill had spoken to Hans about retiring recently, from his job as a meat cutter at Buy-Low Foods. Bill had also suffered two family tragedies recently, as his mother and sister died within days of each other three months ago.
The Jeschek’s said their family has had a lot of community support, including one kind donation of the right sized shoes for their daughter by their United Church minister. For now, they are all living together and looking for a place for Dagmar while she rebuilds her home.
“She wants to rebuild her house, of course in a different way, but she wants to build there,” Hans said.
While they feel the support from neighbours and friends, they urge people to stay off social media until they have had a chance to announce publicly what has happened.
As the family was dealing with the immediate aftermath of Bill’s death, they began to see posts and comments on Facebook announcing his death and speculating about the cause.
“Leave it to the family to announce what’s going on,” Hans said.
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