RITTMAN, Ohio — As Thanksgiving approaches, Kayla Shue and her family are counting their blessings. Thursday night, they lost everything, including their three dogs, after a fire at their home on Jasmin Court in Rittman.

“So nothing is really salvageable in our house,” Shue said. “The fire created thick black smoke which spread throughout the house. Everything was covered.”

Shue, her husband, her 6-year-old sons, her 2-year-old son and her baby escaped from the house with just the shirts on their backs.

The couple’s 6-year-old boy may have saved everyone. Shue says he came to their room to alert them of a problem. “He said, ‘Dad, my TV’s off,'” Shue said.

“We thought it was a pocket breaker. So my husband got up. He came downstairs, the pocket breaker came back on, and he noticed the fire in the back bedroom of our house. He started to shouting ‘fire!'” Shue said. .

There is a GoFundMepage for the family as they seek to recover some of what they lost in the fire.

“Everything really helps,” Shue said. “Even if it’s just a prayer, anything.” She said they needed clothes for the children and baby items, like a walker for the infant.

The couple did not have renters insurance and her husband lost his job last week after an accident.

“The entire passenger side of his truck was gone by the end of the accident,” Shue said. “We lost our dog during this time; he was found about two days later, and now he had died and perished in the fire.

“All three of these rooms were on fire when they came into the room,” Rittman Fire Chief Kyle McDonald said. Chief McDonald told News 5 a faulty dehumidifier was the cause of the fire.

As the temperature drops, the chief says his department receives more calls.

Chef McDonald advises people to never leave heaters or dehumidifiers alone and never use a power strip or extension cord for portable devices.

“A lot of these devices draw way too much current, which causes the circuit to overheat. And that’s the first thing that fails,” McDonald said. “They’ll start to melt, and then they’ll short out. They’ll start to melt if they’re on carpet or cardboard or anything; that’s usually what starts a fire.

McDonald also advises people to check the battery in their smoke detector. There was only one working smoke detector in the house when the fire broke out.

“It was on the first floor and the alarm only went off when they were evacuating the house,” McDonald said.