Family, billeted players escape blaze
All six occupants survive fire that flattened home and destroyed their possessions
She stared, groggy and blearyeyed, at the numbers on her alarm clock glaring an inexplicable 5:48. Jessica Culbertson thought the endless beeping that awakened her was acrueljoke.
“I was mad at first, like, who would set my phone’s alarm for 5:30 on a Saturday morning? Then I kind of really woke up,” she said.
She then thought it was a troublesome carbon monoxide detector sounding its low battery alarm, and nudged her husband Rich awake. Then she smelled the smoke.
He couldn’t smell it, but they looked up and saw smoke roiling and swirling across the ceiling in the bedroom of their Merritt home. They leaped up, ran into the hall and peered down the stairs, where they could see the throbbing orange glow of the hell that was about to engulf their family’s house.
“We ran out of the bedroom and the living room was full of black smoke. We looked downstairs and could see the glow from the flames — and that’s where our daughter’s bedroom is. So he’s like ‘the kids! the kids!’ and went running downstairs.”
Pounding on the doors and walls, Rich woke up their daughter, 15-year-old Emma, and Joey Berkopec, one of the three Merritt Centennial players the family billets. Emma ran through the flames to get to the front door, cutting herself after tripping in the blinding smoke.
Jessica came running down the stairs with the two family dogs and Matthew Kopperud, another player, the shattering skylights raining shards of glass down on them before they escaped out the door into the -10 C winterscape, the stairs collapsing in a fiery heap behind them.
“I don’t remember this, but (Matthew) said I told him ‘cover your head, cover your head’ and we ran down the stairs,” Jessica said. “It was just like a firing range, and people were shooting at us.”
The final player, Jackson Munro, scrambled across the kitchen, which was being eaten away by the fire below, down the patio stairs into the yard, before being stopped by a six-foot-high chain link gate frozen to the ground.
Both the heat from the fire and the sub-zero temperatures caused his bare skin to stick to the metal every time he tried to climb it. Jessica heard his cries, and as flames shot out of the side of the house over their heads, the two managed to wiggle the gate loose enough for him to squeeze through a six-inch gap.
“By the time we got out, I went to look back in as I was on the phone with 911, and the ceiling fell,” Culbertson said.
Wearing nothing but their underwear, apart from the pyjama-clad Culbertson, they jumped into the truck and backed quickly down the driveway.
Three engines and a ladder truck, crewed by 27 firefighters, responded to the blaze, but the six refugees, now dressed in ill-fitting borrowed clothes, watched the home burn down from their neighbours’ property across the street, their feet and fingers burning as feeling returned to their frozen extremities.
It could have been worse — they all
escaped alive, save for the two family cats and Bauer, a dog the boys adopted after finding him at a grocery store four months earlier. But their home was gone. Everything, from clothes and family treasures to Q-tips and passports, had vanished in the blaze.
The Centennials had one more regular season game to play, and after some deliberation and discussion with their opponents, drove south just 24 hours after the Feb. 24 blaze to Langley to face the Rivermen in their BCHL finale.
The drive was a muted one, with the turmoil surrounding the players and the fact the team had played three games in three nights, and five in the last six. They were missing Munro, Berkopec, two other defencemen and a forward — although Kopperud started for Merritt, a day removed from his neardeath experience.
“Usually they hoot and holler, but it was a pretty sombre mood,” said Centennials bus driver Steve Rose. “Exhaustion and emotion just sort of took over on the way down. It was a pretty quiet lot.”
This is where the story rebounds. Rivermen marketing coordinator Amanda Henderson, wife of coach Bobby Henderson, heard of the players’ plight. They quickly set up a donation bowl by the entrance, raising nearly $1,800 for the three players.
“Virtually every Langley fan who came through reached in (their wallets) and grabbed some money. It was amazing,” said Rose, who has driven the team bus for nearly two decades.
“I watched it for a few minutes and was like, ‘Holy cow — this is the spirit of Canadian hockey right here.’ It was wonderful.”
Other teams have reached out to help, including the Wenatchee Wild, the Centennials’ opponents in the playoffs that start Thursday south of the border.
A gofundme page has been set up, and had reached more than $13,000 in the first 24 hours.
The three players started getting on with their lives. First up was replacing their lost passports.
Kopperud, a Denver native, headed to Vancouver with his father, who flew up after the fire, to get a new one from the U.S. Consulate.
Berkopec and Munro, along with trainer Kim Penner and assistant coach Brandon Shaw, sat in the passport office in Surrey for two days before getting emergency replacements.
The team leaves for Wenatchee early Thursday ahead of their first date in the best-of-seven series, a 7 p.m. start at the Town Toyota centre.
“They’re all emotionally and mentally drained,” Merritt coach Joe Martin said. “I think we’re just scratching the surface on helping them. I think we will be a tighter group.
“We haven’t been together much since (the fire). I think if we get everyone on the bus, and start being with each other, that’s when (the healing) will start.”
The Culbertsons won’t be there, as their passports were also destroyed, but will be watching the live feed from their “new home” for the rest of the season: the Comfort Inn in Merritt.
Just a few days before the fire, the Culbertsons won a $10,000 50/50 draw at a Cents game. But the joy over that win has quickly dissipated after the loss of their home.
And the fresh scars from that night remain.
“The kids wouldn’t even turn the furnace on in the hotel that first night. In their heads, that was something that could start a fire,” Culbertson said. “... But we’re all here. It’s amazing that we’re all still standing here. I’m very blessed.”