Neighbors used garden hoses to help douse a fire that gutted the kitchen and killed a dog inside a duplex apartment at 1718 S. 1500 East Monday afternoon.
The fire caused an estimated $40,000 in damage, said Battalion Chief Steve Higgs of the Salt Lake City Fire Department.Cause of the fire remained unknown as of Tuesday morning.
Apartment resident Marc Conn returned about 5 p.m. from snowboarding at Solitude ski resort to be greeted by a dense fog of smoke in the neighborhood.
"We saw a cloud layer (of smoke) here and wondered what it was, and then we said, `Oh my heck, your house is on fire!' " said Shawn Lockwood, Conn's friend and fellow snowboarder.
Shortly before Conn arrived, his neighbors noticed smoke and fire coming out of the kitchen windows and began spraying it with garden hoses.
"Hoses were coming from every angle when we got there," Lock-wood said.
The help, however, was not with out risk. While spraying the outside of the kitchen a window exploded and sprayed glass across the lawn, said neighbor Su Armatage.
After Conn arrived, he and the neighbors kicked in the door and Conn went in to try to save his pets, two dogs and two cats. He managed to get one of each in time, but the other cat had disappeared and the other dog, a Dalmatian, was dead.
"I'm just glad we got here when we did," Conn said. "Otherwise they would have all died."
The garden hoses were effective enough that Salt Lake firefighters doused what was left of the blaze in less than a minute, Higgs said.