Twist in Conn. fire
No hydrant water
The three little girls who died in a 2011 Christmas Day inferno in Stamford, Conn., were doomed by an electrical fire that sent smoke and flames ripping up through the walls toward their third-floor bedrooms, according to a just-released deposition that describes the blaze in new detail.
Further sealing their fate: the girls and their mother, Madonna Badger, had lived in the under-renovation Victorian mansion for four months without the hydrants in front of and behind the house connected to the city water system, the new court papers reveal.
“Everybody stood there running around, tripping over friggin’ hoses, wondering what to do,” contractor Michael Borcina said in a deposition that describes a tragedy of errors in the moments after firefighters arrived at the blaze, which also killed Badger’s parents.
“God bless them, they showed up, [but] it was way beyond anything that they were capable of handling,” Borcina — who had been dating Madonna Badger and was living in the house at the time of the tragedy — told lawyers for the girls’ father, Matthew Badger.
Compounding matters, arriving firefighters also failed to turn off the home’s gas, claimed Borcina — engulfing the victims in the resulting fireball.
Matthew Badger is suing the city, arguing that officials allowed his children and ex-wife to live in an under-construction home that was essentially a firetrap.
Stamford officials insist the fire was caused by improperly discarded fireplace ashes. Both Madonna Badger and Borcina, the fire’s sole surviving witnesses — who are no longer dating — have repeatedly insisted huge, white sparks were arcing out of the electrical meter outside the house as they fled.
Meanwhile, the home’s century-old structural wood had lit up like kindling inside the walls, Borcina said in the deposition.
“You take an old piece of wood and you throw it in a fire, in an existing fire, it’s going to catch right away and it’s going to burn really quickly,” Borcina said in the deposition.