14 DAY TRIAL // A little girl from McFarland in California has saved her family from a fire in their home by predicting that something bad would happen.
Maria Elias tells KGET TV that she sensed her siblings were in danger and got them out before the fire started, on Sunday morning.
Her family was living in a three-bedroom house on the 200 block of San Pedro Street, along with two other families. A total of 20 people were in the house when it caught on fire.
Elias predicted on Saturday night that she was in danger.
"I couldn't go to sleep because I knew something was going to happen," she recalls.
She got her brothers and younger sister out of the house and they were not harmed.
"I would hold her tight, a little bit tight because I would not want to leave her down," she says of her sister.
All the residents survived the fire without major injuries, but the structure was burnt down. The rented home incurred $85,000 (€64,000) worth of damage, officials say.
By talking to residents, fire fighters have determined that the flames started from a faulty electrical circuit.
"Interviewing people on scene, they determined that they feel it was caused by electrical. And, the reason they came to that conclusion, they had one of the individuals in the house who was laying on one of the beds and looked over, noticed a popping and burning smell coming from one of the walls near the bed," Corey Wilford says, speaking for the Kern County Fire Department.
The home was not equipped with smoke detectors and the landlord might be in violation of state law for housing so many people in a crammed space.
"Our firefighters on scene never found a working smoke detector in the structure and the residents were actually lucky enough that somebody witnessed the fire and we want to really stress to people that smoke detectors save lives," Wilford explains.