An early-morning fire Wednesday left a rural Washburn family homeless headed into the Thanksgiving holiday. The fire was reported at about 2 a.m. at the home of Kirby Krueger on Friendly Valley Road about eight miles north of the city, Washburn Fire Chief Mike Pedersen said. “By the time we got there almost half the house was engulfed already,” he said. “The people got out, luckily. They smelled the smoke and woke up and got out with just what they had on, that’s it.” Pedersen said firefighters worked through the night, dumping a total of 35,000 gallons of water on the blaze. But the fire had advanced so much by the time they arrived that the building could not be saved. “It’s a long ranch house and it started on one end of the house and burned all the way to the other end,” Pedersen said. “We’re still looking at what the cause was.”