- April 25, 2024
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After fire ripped a hole in their roof, causing $40,000 in damages, four students need to find a new place to live for the rest of their semester.
BY MATT MENCARINI | STAFF WRITER
After your Monday morning begins with fire ripping a hole in the ceiling of your home, sometimes there’s nothing more you can do than eat pizza and wait for the Red Cross.
“(I) woke up this morning to the sound of the fire alarm,” Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University student Merle McDowell said. “I thought my roommate left something on in the kitchen.”
McDowell and his roommates searched the house, at 735 Garden Lane, for the source of the smoke. It wasn’t a roommate's candle, which had set the fire alarm off once before.
A fourth roommate, who wasn’t home when the fire broke out, lives in the master bedroom, which was damaged in the fire while the rest of the rooms remained unharmed.
McDowell and the other two roommates jokingly said they were no longer upset they didn’t get the master bedroom when they moved into the house.
David Hess said he grabbed a fire extinguisher and looked for the fire, but he didn’t see the flames until he stepped outside. Fire had ripped a hole in the roof, above the kitchen, and the flames were visible. They called 911.
“The cause of the fire appears to be electrical in nature and was unintentional,” the police department said in a statement. “At this time the damages appeared to be approximately $40,000.”
McDowell said he could hear the sirens before he even got off the phone with dispatch.
“(The fire department) sent the whole brigade,” he said. “They did their thing.”
Crews worked their way through the home to put out the fire, he added, which was isolated to the ceiling above the kitchen and master bedroom. The fire department had to rip apart the ceiling in the kitchen to get to the flames.
Nearly an hour after the fire department left, as the roommates sat in the driveway eating pizza Ryan Kirce and Pernell Croskey, of Kustom Disaster Recovery and Restoration brought, there was still nearly an inch of water on the kitchen floor, and the master bedroom was covered with wet ash and debris.
Now the students, in between going to class and studying for tests, need to find somewhere new to study and sleep.
“I think the biggest problem is going to be the search for somewhere else to live,” said Hess, who added that this was the one short week this semester and that he and his roommates will only be in the area until May, when they leave for internships.
