This was a city house fire that occurred at 8:35 pm on Christmas Eve 2005.
The department was delivering gifts to children in charlotte as an annual Christmas Kiddies event, when they had to go from playing Santa to being firefighters.
The first truck at the scene was only about one block away reporting flames on the first and second floors.
As the next two trucks pulled up to the scene fireman had to come from riding on the tailboard of the fire truck to getting an SCBA's on and help extinguish the fire. It only took about 15 minutes to knock the fire down.
The fire was started by an ember from the fire place that had landed next to the Christmas tree and ignited the things around it.
The people that lived at the house were in the downstairs wrapping presents and had ignored the smoke detector for several minutes thinking it was the meat in the oven cooking that made it go off.
Only one of the family members was taken to the hospital for smoke inhalation.
