MOBILE COUNTY, Ala. — Cleanup is underway at a home on Postoak Circle after a lightning strike started a fire that spread through the attic and left the house unlivable.
Homeowner Harry Newman was not there when it happened. His neighbor was.
“I heard three booms,” Ellison Schaff said.
“It was real bad,” Newman said of the storm. “Yeah. There were a lot of lightning strikes, in fact.”
How the fire spread
“I looked out the window, and I saw the tree on fire, and the garage was on fire, too,” Schaff said.
Mobile Fire Rescue responded just before 3:30 p.m. Thursday and worked to extinguish the flames. No one was injured, though Newman said his girlfriend was inside the house when the lightning struck.
“It started in the back of the house, in the garage, which is down the driveway, and it went up into the attic from there,” Newman said. “And there’s basically … like, a connection to the rest of the house there, and it just spread throughout the attic at that point.”
Attic spread is a common and difficult pattern in residential fires. Once flames reach an unfinished attic, they find open framing, ample ventilation and no compartmentalization to slow them, which is why a fire that begins in a detached or semi-detached garage can compromise an entire structure.
What’s left
Newman said the home is unlivable. The most significant damage is inside the garage, but smoke damage extends throughout the house — a category of loss that is easy to underestimate, since smoke penetrates insulation, ductwork, drywall and soft furnishings well beyond the areas that burned.
He is not waiting to begin the work.
“I’m just taking it one day at a time and not really worrying about how much it’s going to cost to fix it at this point,” Newman said. “But we need to get it cleaned up so that we can salvage our things that we can out of the house.”
Neighbors turning out
Newman said he is thankful for the support from people around him.
“A lot of people, you know, they don’t have the means to do a lot of this stuff,” Schaff said. “So, you know, I thought about coming out here and helping out the neighbors and trying to fix everything up, you know, making it look like how it was.”
Lightning safety
The official cause of the fire remains under investigation. Lightning-caused structure fires are most common during the summer months along the Gulf Coast, and they frequently ignite in attics and roof structures where the strike enters. Homeowners are advised to unplug sensitive electronics during storms, and anyone who hears a strike close enough to feel it should check the attic and smell for smoke, since lightning fires can smolder undetected for a considerable period before becoming visible.