Dan Harrelson, village public safety officer in White Mountain, spent the early part of Friday night at home where some friends were over using his shop to work on snow machines. Then just after 11 p.m., his 13-year-old niece, Tiffany Lincoln, came running through the door.

Fire, she said. At her house. And it was locked.

Four people, including her grandmother and brother, were inside.

Harrelson grabbed his gear and headed out, his friends behind him. But it was already too late. All four -- Josephine Lincoln, 71; Patrick Lincoln, 24; Frank Oksoktaruk, 51; Dean Lincoln, 43 -- were likely dead by then, a loss that would leave his small, tight-knit community, including members of his own family, stunned with grief.

Harrelson has been in charge of responding to emergencies in the Seward Peninsula village of 200 since the early '90s. Fighting fires in a tiny village without a fire truck or official fire department isn't easy. Just a few years earlier he'd been helpless to stop a devastating blaze as it wiped out the village school.

He ran a hundred feet down the road to the airport, where he saw the Lincoln house. It was clear it had been burning for a while.

Back at his house, his wife went through the phone list calling everybody in town, including the village's 10 volunteer firefighters. Soon the faces of his neighbors appeared from the dark. Every adult he knew was there.

"And we had a lot of 14-, 15-, 16-year-old boys there to do what they could do," he said.

Unlike some villages, White Mountain is lucky to have a system of hydrants and hoses that allow some fire protection. They pointed the hose at the blaze. Flames crashed out the rear window.

"We had to use a wood-splitting maul to break in," he said.

Tiffany was being raised by her grandmother, Josephine. Josephine is an aunt of Harrelson's wife. Tiffany's brother, Patrick, lived there, too. The other two victims were visitors. There were reports they had been drinking earlier in the evening, Harrelson said.

Once the door was open, Harrelson tried to look inside, down the hall, to see if he could see anyone alive. He didn't see anything in the foot or so of clearance below the smoke. The house was an old three-bedroom unit, built by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The paneling on the walls fed the flames, he said.

The heat was searing, the smoke thick. He couldn't go in. He couldn't get them out. It seemed impossible anyone could be alive in the smoke.

"You make a decision right then that you have to fight the fire from outside," he said.

Villagers had the fire under control after 1 a.m., he said, but they didn't get the whole thing extinguished until 4:30. Everyone helped. Those who weren't fighting the fire brought drinks and food to those who were, he said.

"It was a real community effort," he said.

Sunday, Harrelson met with the relatives of the dead, sat with them in their shock and sadness.

"They're having a pretty tough time," he said.

The village may have one large joint funeral, he said.

A fire marshal and state trooper investigator are headed in to investigate the cause, said trooper spokeswoman Megan Peters. They were hampered Sunday by bad weather.