Air purifier saves family during fire at northwest Austin apartment
AUSTIN, Texas - A family's air purifier helped save their lives when their apartment complex in north Austin caught fire last week. The family is thankful to have survived and is now trying to recover after losing their home and everything in it.
"It's like all black," Jayd Aleman said.
Aleman sifted through the rubble Friday morning.
"This was my living room," Aleman said.
She recalled the early morning when her home went up in flames. It happened on Jan. 18 at the Bent Tree Apartment Complex.
"I woke up to a loud, it sounded like an explosion, like phew, I didn't know what it was, I really thought someone was breaking into my apartment at that point," Aleman said.
She said she woke up her husband to investigate what was going on. The apartment was filled with smoke.
"No smoke alarms went off," Aleman said.
Aleman said what did go off was the air purifier.
When Aleman and her husband saw it last Thursday, she said, "It was like this moment of quiet, and we're in this dark living room and all I can hear is my air purifier beeping, and it's red, it's reading 900, clean air, it reads around 10 to 15, so that's extremely dirty, it was like beep beep beep, super loud."
Aleman said they woke up their children.
"Picked them up, just what we had, weren't thinking of anything else," Aleman said.
They called 911 and alerted their neighbors.
"There’s a fire, get out," Aleman can be heard saying on the Ring doorbell camera.
"It's okay, we're safe, it's okay, we're safe, I just kept repeating that," Aleman said.
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Now, all their things are gone.
"If it's not water damage, it's smoke, it's chemicals, these were white curtains, they're not white anymore," Aleman said.
As they try to recover and rebuild, Aleman said at the top of their list is an air purifier.
"We will buy another air purifier, and we will probably put one in every room," Aleman said.
The Aleman family is staying at a sister property of the apartment complex but is still trying to rebuild and buy necessities. They said right now they are sleeping on mattresses on the floor.
A GoFundMe has been set up to help the Aleman family rebuild.
The cause of the fire is still under investigation.