Updated: A FAMILY of three is lucky to alive after escaping a fire at their York home.

The blaze tore through the house in the Huntington area of the city in the early hours of yesterday after a chip pan caught fire, leaving a mother terrified that her partner was “lying dead in the kitchen”.

Colin Elmer battled the flames while his girlfriend Debbie, 46, and her son Paul, 20, remained trapped in the bedrooms of the burning building in Brandsby Grove.

Fire service workers spoke to Debbie and Paul on their mobile phones giving them lifesaving instructions to shut the bedroom door, to place a coat along the bottom of the door and to get to a window to breathe in fresh air.

After the fire they said the family had a lucky escape as there was no smoke alarm fitted in the home. Colin, 64, said he woke to hear his partner shouting and saw the fire which destroyed the £10,000 kitchen which had just been completed the day before.

“I had put the chip pan on and fell asleep in the living room,” Colin said. “I woke up – it must have been just before 2am – to Debbie shouting.

“I knew then instinctively that I had left the chip pan on. I ran to the kitchen and saw flames leaping up from the oven and work surface. The heat was so intense. I was nearly crying with frustration that I couldn’t get near the fire. I felt so inadequate.

“All I could think of was that Debbie and Paul were upstairs and I didn’t want the whole house to go up. I just wanted to find some way of stopping the fire.”

Colin said he began heaping on piles of damp tea towels on the flames in an attempt to put out the blaze.

He said: “The fire started to fizzle out and I managed to grab the chip pan and put it in the garden.

“About that time the firefighters arrived. Debbie had called them.

“She told me later that when she woke up all she saw was black smoke and she couldn’t see. She said when she looked out of the bedroom window she saw a ball of fire in the kitchen in the reflection of the glass.

“She thought I was lying dead in the kitchen.”

Firefighters led Colin, who suffers with chest problems, out into the garden and helped Debbie and Paul get out of the smoke-filled property using breathing apparatus.

“Because I inhaled a lot of smoke I had to go to hospital,” Colin said.

“Debbie had suffered from smoke inhalation too, as did Paul, but they were treated by paramedics outside the house.

“I know the fire is my fault, but disaster was averted. We had a lucky escape.”

He said Debbie had been left traumatised by the incident. She later told firefighters that if her daughter had been staying in the house she may have been killed.

A neighbour said he was awoken by the sound of fire engines, police and ambulance descending on the street at about 2am. “We ran outside and saw smoke billowing from the property,” he said. “I think the whole street was woken up by it. I feel so sorry for the family; it must have been very traumatic.”

A spokesman for North Yorkshire Fire & Rescue said the blaze caused 75 per cent fire damage to the kitchen and 25 per cent smoke damage to the house.