Girl, 10, Saves Family in Burning House : Fire: The child awoke to the smell of smoke in her Panorama City home. She alerted her sleeping grandparents, uncle and brother. There were no injuries.

A 10-year-old girl alerted her sleeping family to a fire in their Panorama City home Monday and helped evacuate them, winning praise from firefighters for possibly saving their lives.

Raquel Guerrero and fire officials said that because she slept in the top bed of a bunk bed, she may have smelled smoke before anyone else in the house in the 14100 block of Terra Bella Street.

“They were lucky,” Los Angeles Fire Department Battalion Chief Robert Teachenor said. “The little girl woke up and smelled smoke and got them all out in time.”

Raquel told fire officials that she jumped down from her bed after waking about 1 a.m. and awoke her 15-year-old brother, Romie, who was in the bottom bunk.

The children said their room was filling with smoke coming from the hallway. Romie jumped through a window while Raquel ran through the hall and out the front door.

But both then ran back into the smoke-filled house yelling and waking their grandparents and an uncle.

“I just tried to get everybody out as fast as we could,” Raquel recalled. “There was smoke everywhere.”

Raquel said she saw fire in her mother’s bedroom.

The three adults and two children escaped without injury. But the family members spent several terrifying minutes not knowing if the children’s mother, Rosina Robinson, was trapped in the burning bedroom or had left for her night job at a towing company.

The children’s uncle, Alex Ramirez, crawled part way into the burning room but did not see Robinson.

After firefighters arrived, they searched the home and rescued five family pets--a dog and four kittens--but determined that Robinson was not there.

“She had gone to work, but we didn’t know,” Raquel said. “I was scared until they were sure.”

Teachenor said a religious candle left burning in the bedroom apparently sparked the fire.

Fire officials said deaths often result when carbon monoxide from fires reaches sleeping victims and anesthetizes them before the smell of smoke can wake them.

Because smoke rises and initially will fill the top half of a room, Raquel’s position on the top bunk may have allowed her to smell the smoke before she succumbed to carbon monoxide, officials said.

“Somehow she got a whiff of the smoke early enough to sound the alarm,” Teachenor said.

The battalion chief said the house was equipped with smoke alarms but they did not sound, apparently because the batteries had run down.

The fire was mostly confined to two bedrooms and a hallway but smoke damage occurred throughout, Teachenor said. The loss was estimated at about $50,000.

On Monday morning, members of the family were left to pick through the burned and wet debris that firefighters cleared out of the house. Family members said they would rely on relatives and the Red Cross to provide them with temporary shelter.