Resident Apparently Out When Blaze Guts Home
By Nikita Stewart and Martin Weil
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, May 26, 2008
Three firefighters suffered serious burns and three others were also injured yesterday in an effort to quell a raging blaze that tore through a house in Loudoun County near Leesburg, authorities said.
Firefighters arrived about 1 p.m. on Meadowood Court in the Potomac Station development to find the attic of the house burning fiercely, said Mary L. Maguire, county fire department spokeswoman.
After four firefighters went inside, she said, "things started to deteriorate rapidly. They called for a Mayday," an emergency distress call.
"They were in trouble, and they were getting out," she said. "As they did, those injuries occurred."
The most seriously injured were sent to the burn unit at Washington Hospital Center, where their conditions were described as stable last night by Maguire.
One firefighter was being kept overnight at Inova Loudoun Hospital at Lansdowne. The four hospitalized firefighters were all based in Ashburn, Maguire said.
Another was treated at Inova Loudoun's Cornwall campus and released, she said. A sixth firefighter was treated at the scene.
Details of their injuries and how they occurred were not immediately available.
Some neighbors said the blaze appeared to have gutted the two-story Williamsburg colonial, leaving it uninhabitable.
The cause of the fire could not be learned immediately. Neighbors said investigators were going through the first floor of the house last night.
The fire, which apparently broke out shortly before 1 p.m., was engulfing the house as firefighters began arriving, witnesses said.
"It was huge," neighbor Diana Stumm said. "I've never seen anything like that. It was awful."
After smelling smoke and hearing a commotion, she said, she looked out to see "flames coming out the rooftop."
Then, she said, "the roof was just totally on fire. Flames were coming out of the windows, billowing out and up on the roof."
"There was black smoke everywhere," said another neighbor, Vera Stewart.
Nearby resident John Steedman said that when he became aware of the fire, a rear sunroom, a back deck and a rear fireplace were "almost engulfed in flame."
He said tongues of flame "were starting to lick out of the house and up onto the second story roof."
"The whole roof was in flames" within minutes, he said.
As firefighters arrived, Steedman said, some forced open the front door, while others set up a hose line to fight the blaze from the rear where the flames appeared to be most intense.
Roland Smith, head of the community association in the 1,491-house development on the eastern edge of Leesburg, praised the efforts of firefighters.
Firefighters who responded also came from Hamilton, Leesburg, Sterling, Lucketts and Fairfax County, Maguire said.
Neighbors described the house as about 10 years old with a brick front, peaked roof surfaced with asphalt shingles, and vinyl siding.
Heat from the flames was intense enough to melt siding on adjacent houses on the two-block street, which has a cul-de-sac at either end and an intersection in the middle.
It appeared that no one was at the house when the fire broke out. Stumm said the woman who lives there had gone to Leesburg with her mother to buy plants.
When the woman returned, Stumm said, the neighborhood had been closed off by authorities.
"That's how she found out," Stumm said.
Stumm said the woman kept three cats who habitually remained indoors. All apparently fled the fire, she said, and neighbors were searching for them yesterday evening.
She said the woman works in accounting and was planning to spend the night with her mother, who lives in Leesburg.
She said the woman was able to retrieve papers from a severely burned automobile in the carport of the house.
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