Courtesy Photo Firefighters battle a blaze in Posen on Tuesday night.

POSEN ― A quick-thinking gas station employee saved nine lives late Tuesday night when he pounded on two doors to alert residents to a raging fire next door.

As he readied to close the Posen EZ Mart for the night, Jim Haske saw flames leaping from a cement block building across the street. Ordering a customer to call 911, he raced to the home closest to the fire, where his boss, John Rasmussen, and family lived.

“Everybody’s safe,” Rasmussen said on Wednesday, philosophical about the fire that destroyed a building feet from his 1910 home. “That’s all that matters.”

Nobody was in the burning building, most recently used for storage of derby cars, at the time of the fire, Rasmussen said.

Rasmussen, his wife, Sheilla, and their two children were asleep with flames outside their bedroom windows when Haske pounded on their door about 10 p.m. Tuesday. Haske said he nearly broke in the window to wake the family.

“If the store was closed, we wouldn’t have made it out,” Sheilla Rasmussen said.

Firefighters later told Rasmussen that, had they arrived about two minutes later, the home would have been engulfed by the fire next door.

While Rasmussen got his family and pets outside, Haske raced to the home on the other side of the burning building. There, Haske begged the resident to look outside to see the flames coming from the cement block building and move his family to safety.

The residents huddled against the outside wall of the gas station across the street, waves of heat from the fire blowing against their bodies. Haske hit the emergency stop for the fuel lines to prevent a fire at the gas station.

Firefighters arrived quickly, four fire departments staying outside the building and working the fire until the early morning hours of Wednesday, according to Sheilla Rasmussen.

The neighbors speculated the fire was caused by electrical problems, but they hadn’t heard an official ruling from the fire department.

On Wednesday morning, firefighter Victoria Montgomery stopped by the scene of the fire she helped fight the night before. The blaze had been only her second since joining the Posen Fire Department, and the second in less than two weeks after a recent fire near Polaski Road and Long Lake Highway.

“I like fire,” Montgomery said as she overlooked the building’s smoldering remains with Sheilla Rasmussen. “I’m the crazy person who will run into the fire, not away from it.”

The concrete walls helped contain the fire, Montgomery said. Low wind kept the fire from spreading to the homes next door, but the Rasmussen home sustained smoke damage, and the heat of the fire melted its siding.

Cars and gas tanks stored in the building exploded in the fire, one explosion so violent it blew a garage door off, Haske reported. A resident with a logging truck used its claw to pull the burning building’s walls down to help firefighters access the fire, Haske said.

Earlier on Tuesday, before the fire, Haske picked up an application to work for the Rogers City Fire Department. He’s training to become an emergency medical technician.

The rescuer was quick to credit Wyatt Romel, the young customer who came in just before closing time and first called Haske’s attention to the flames across the street.

“Nine people could have just died there,” Haske said. “Divine intervention. That’s proof, right there.”