Up in flames
Resident scrambles to protect his home after being woken by inferno
An Aramoho resident ran for his garden hose after being woken in the middle of the night to a neighbouring house engulfed in flames. The Kaikokopu Rd house was destroyed by the fire which also damaged two other properties.
Police and fire investigators spent the day on the scene working to determine the cause of the blaze which started in a vacant house just before 2am yesterday. A couple who live next door told the Chronicle they were woken by the bright light of the blaze and saw flames pouring from the windows of the empty wooden villa.
Gary Simonson rang 111 before getting a hose from the back garden to douse the wall of his house while waiting for fire crews to arrive.
“It started to get really hot out there,” he said.
Whanganui fire senior station officer Craig
Gardiner said the house, which had been on the market, was fully ablaze and threatening both properties either side when fire crews arrived.
Simonson’s house had “quite a bit of heat damage”.
“And it’s actually broken the windows on that house,” Gardiner said.
Firefighters laid hose lines to protect the neighbouring houses.
“We could see there was nothing really salvageable because the fire was coming out off every opening so we just worked on what we could save.”
Simonson said the fire also caused paint blistering on his house while the plastic joiners between fibrolite melted.
The plastic spouting of a sleepout of a property on the other side melted as well.
Firefighters were back at about 6am when smouldering behind a false ceiling flared up.
No one was injured in the fire and Simonson said the house had been empty for about six
months and had not been maintained. There was an open home last weekend with several people interested, he said.
It is the second major Whanganui fire at vacant properties to be put under investigation in the past three weeks after a historical Victoria Ave building was also destroyed by an early morning blaze.
Police are still unable to say what caused that fire which rendered the two-storey property in need of
demolition.