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."
What's left
Newman said the home is unlivable.
The most significant damage is inside the garage, but smoke damage extends throughout the house. 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."
The official cause of the fire remains under investigation.
Lightning safety
The National Weather Service advises that no place outdoors is safe when thunder can be heard, because lightning can strike 10 miles or more from the storm that produces it. Its guidance is to get inside an enclosed building or a hard-topped vehicle as soon as thunder is heard and to wait 30 minutes after the last thunder before going back outside. Indoors, the agency recommends staying off corded phones and away from plumbing and electrical equipment that plugs into the wall during a storm.
