A Hubbard man may have lost his home to a fire this morning, but thanks to his dog, his life was saved.
"If he hadn't gotten me up we would have both been barbecued," said Stephen Brall.
Brall was upstairs sleeping when his home on Roseview Drive caught on fire. He had a smoke detector, but it's batteries were dead. That's where his dog, Bettis, came in.
"He came upstairs and started nudging me and barking at me, and as soon as I got up I couldn't even see anything the smoke was so thick," said Brall.
Dog in hand, he made his way down the stairs by memory.
"I came out around here," said Brall. "I felt the door...and I saw nothing out here but white. And I started choking a little bit, got downstairs, felt my way towards the door, and I had a hold of Bettis. I had him by his collar because I thought he was getting a little bit afraid. I didn't want him to panic and go backwards and then I'd have to come back in and get him."
When fire crews arrived, the home was engulfed in flames. There would have been a different outcome had a few more minutes passed before the dog alerted Brall.
"I don't think we'd be talking to him today," said Hubbard Fire Chief John Clemente. "Because the smoke was so heavy upstairs and the heat was so great."
Bettis was a rescue dog that Brall adopted.
