Chief Frederick Welsh spoke to the city council last night about the deadly Princeton Avenue fire.

Chief Frederick Welsh of the College Park Volunteer Fire Department walked city council members through the battle against Saturday’s fatal fire last night, emphasizing the importance of safety and prevention until more can be determined about what caused the fire.

Welsh said firefighters were on their way to the Princeton Avenue house within less than a minute of receiving the initial call, arriving to find the front of the house already in flames. Stephen “Tex” Aarons, trapped by fire and smoke on the second floor, had leaped from a second-story window to escape before the firefighters arrived, Welsh said.

“His face was drooping… [Aarons] said he was severely hurt and came to us asking for help,” he said.

The fire, which most likely started on the front porch, had reached the roof of the porch and rolled over to the second floor of the house, feeding on the wood and vinyl siding and spreading into the front rooms of both floors through broken windows, Welsh said.

While firefighters initially limited themselves to attacking the flames from the outside of the house, they switched rapidly over to an “offensive” position, pushing into the house to extinguish the fire from within.

Within six or seven minutes of attacking the interior with their largest-caliber hoses, College Park firefighters controlled the fire in the front three rooms of the house and allowed firefighters from Branchville Volunteer Fire Department to move up the stairs into the second floor.

The front of the house was so consumed with smoke and fire it was uninhabitable, Welsh said, but firefighters found Michael Anthony Scrocca unconscious in a porch-like rear bedroom within 15 minutes of arriving at the scene.

Welsh received many thanks from the council for the department’s rapid response, but deflected all praise to the firefighters.

“The real credit belongs to the men and women fighting the fire,” he said. “I just happened to be the worried one out by the command vehicle, hoping nobody got hurt.”

Investigators are fairly confident of the source of the fire, Welsh said, but were still piecing together the cause and had not yet ruled out any possibility. With one death and one serious injury involved, investigators were trying to be “specific and airtight” in considering the cause, he said.

“Friends of Mike and the community really deserve to know,” said outgoing Student Liaison Drew Vetter. “The city and the university need to keep pressure on fire investigators to find out what really happened here.”

The fire could have begun long before it was large enough to be reported or even noticed, depending on the fuels and configuration of the fire — some cigarettes or overstuffed couches can smolder for hours under certain conditions, Welsh said.

Investigators found evidence of some compressed gas or liquid on the front porch, but have not yet been able to make any conclusions about its role.

“We don’t know if it contributed to the start, was used to start or had nothing to do with the fire,” Welsh said.

Council members reemphasized the same message of prevention and planning they began spreading the day after the fire, planning programs to distribute free smoke detectors and cooperate with the university in spreading the message of “get out, stay alive.”

District 1 Councilman Dave Milligan — a former volunteer firefighter — insisted on the importance of having a working smoke detector outside every bedroom and calling 911 immediately after evacuating in the event of an emergency.

Monday night, city and university officials met with state and county fire marshals to discuss fire safety education, and University Fire Marshal Alan Sactor — regarded as an expert in student fire safety — was scheduled to brief many of College Park’s landlords at tonight’s meeting of the Prince George’s County Property Owners Association.

Vetter, however, wanted a more proactive response once a cause has been found.

“I’d like to see something aside from the usual safety initiatives,” Vetter said. “Those probably didn’t have a lot of bearing here … We need to know what [investigators] find, just to keep another from happening.”