DAWSON CITY – Sometimes, the fire isn't completely out.

It was mid-afternoon Wednesday, the day after the Seventh Avenue fire which badly damaged a house.

Craig "Chedda” Dunham and a couple of visitors were sitting on his front walk, talking about the hullaballoo of the previous morning, when one of his visitors said, "Isn't that smoke?”

There had been a sort of heat haze coming off the building since Tuesday's action, but this was actual smoke – not a lot, but enough to worry Dunham, whose Yukon Housing Corp. unit had actually caught fire on its south side wooden siding the day before.

He ran right in and called the fire department.

Fire chief Jim Regimbal had cruised by the house several times since the initial fire. He hadn't seen any signs of trouble, but a crew was there in short order.

After some investigation, they found an out-of-the-way spot in the crawl space under the building that was smoldering.

"I kind of thought this might have happened yesterday,” Regimbal said as they wrapped up operations several hours later. He'd been by to check for hot spots but had detected nothing.

"I think with the build-up of the wind today getting in underneath the crawl space, it reignited a bit. It was nice that the neighbour spotted it and called us in,” the chief said.

"We cut a few holes, put some foam on it. We've got fire practice tonight, so we'll come back and check on it again.”

The original fire began from cigarette debris in the kitchen area of the house.

Witnesses described fire blasting out of the window on that north side.

Dunham's unit is fewer than 10 metres from the one the Reid family was living in and the south side of his house was on fire when the trucks arrived early Tuesday morning.

"When we got here yesterday with my first line that came off (the truck), I didn't even worry about (the burning house),” Regimbal recalled Wednesday.

"We just aimed to get the one out on Chedda's so it wouldn't take hold. It was licking up the siding a bit and heading up, so we just knocked it down and made sure everything was fine.”

In that model of bungalow, the south end of the building is where the bedrooms are located.

A further problem with these houses is that they've all been retrofitted with second roof structures over the original low-sloped roofs that created snow load problems in the past.

Checking the condition of the original roof means having to peel back the outer tin roof to see what's going on underneath that.

On Wednesday, the small response crew rechecked everywhere they had gone the day before, extinguished the smoldering areas they did find, opened up more of the roof, sprayed retardant foam all around under the crawlspace.

They put another layer of retardant on the wall of Dunham's home too, just in case.

When the original fire broke out Tuesday morning, a passerby alerted a teenager sleeping inside to flee the burning building.