A young child likely helped her family safely escape a small house fire after alerting her mother something had gone wrong in the kitchen.

The Elizabethton Fire Department responded to the fire at 401 N. East St. at 9:30 a.m. Tuesday and quickly extinguished the small kitchen fire that had started to spread to the crawl space beneath the home.

Early investigations showed the fire likely started with a kitchen appliance, EFD Chief Barry Carrier said.

“One of the small children in the home told her mother she heard a pop in the kitchen and saw smoke coming from behind one of the appliances,” Carrier said. “The mother went to check. She had her infant in her arms and saw the fire starting behind the appliance and got all of the children out of the home.”

A family of seven — three adults and four children — have been displaced from the home until repairs can be made. The Red Cross is assisting the family.

By the time the family left the home, smoke was visible from the outside and a passerby had called 911. The fire was limited to the kitchen area inside the home but had started to spread under the home through the crawl space, Carrier said.

“The damage is mostly in the kitchen,” he said. “There was not a lot of structural damage from the fire, but there was smoke damage. We will have to cut through the floorboards and the walls to make sure we have all the hot spots and that everything is completely out.”

There were no injuries reported in the fire. Members of the Elizabethton Police Department blocked North East Street from Broad Street to First Street until the scene was cleared later in the morning.