A dog barking and licking one's face at 1:30 a.m. is probably not what most of us would consider the ideal way to be awakened.
  But Jo Schmitt and her 12-year-old daughter Stacy were grateful for their persistent canine wakeup call - a Corgi named Buddy. Schmitt said as soon as Buddy woke her Friday morning she could tell that something inside her home at 8944 Glendale Circle was on fire.
  "I could see and smell the smoke right away," Schmitt said. "I tried to figure out where it was coming from, but couldn't, so I called my husband who was working out of town to tell him. I hadn't checked the garage yet, and when I opened the door I could feel heat and see dense smoke."
  Schmitt told her husband she was calling 911 because the garage was on fire, and immediately woke up Stacy and told her to take the dogs outside. Once Stacy and the dogs were safe, Schmitt went back into the house to find her cat. She said the house was full of smoke, but she found the cat and ran outside.
  The family hustled into the car that was parked in the driveway, and Schmitt parked it down the road away from the house. She said the fire department arrived right after that.
  Eric Ward, chief of the Blue Township Fire Department, said in a press release that "fire officials credit the dog with saving the life of the family."
  He also had some reminders about fire safety in the home.
  "The majority of fire fatalities occur at night in homes, when people are asleep and will not smell smoke or notice anything amiss," Ward stated. "In a fire, the poisonous gases build rapidly, until occupants are incapacitated or worse. This can occur within minutes of the fire's start.
  "In this case, with no working smoke detector, the dog stepped in to awaken its family and alert them to the danger. Had it not warned them, or had it been incapacitated by the smoke before it could do so, the outcome would likely have been tragic."
  Schmitt agrees, saying Buddy is her hero.
  "I was sound asleep," she said. "If Buddy hadn't awakened me, I don't think I would have. Even afterward, when I was running around the house looking for the fire, Buddy and my black Lab, Ace, were with me the whole time. They never left my side."
  Ward said the house was full of smoke when the fire department arrived. He said they entered and found heavy fire in the back of the garage, which they quickly extinguished.
  "The quick response, and the fact that the resident had closed the door prevented the fire from spreading," Ward said in the press release.
  Investigation revealed that a freezer had been plugged in to an extension cord, which was coiled in a pile under some items stored in the garage. Ward said this created an insulated source of heat, which degraded the insulation on the power wire until is shorted out and ignited the things around it. The damage was confined to the garage, with minor smoke damage in the house.
  "We were very fortunate," Schmitt said. "You know how you always think about what you would try to save in the house if there were a fire? That thought never even crossed my mind. I just wanted to get everybody and get out. We were lucky."