Bonaire fire ends in total loss

BONAIRE, Ga. — It was still dark that morning when the Houston County Fire Department received calls regarding a fire at 304 Fleming Drive. The first call came in at 5:10 a.m. Monday morning.

One of the people living in the home told the 911 operator that their back porch was on fire. Three minutes later, another call came in — this time, Houston County Fire was told the home was fully engulfed.

According to Houston County Fire Chief Chris Stoner, he and his team arrived to a fully involved fire.

“When we first got on scene, our first arriving trucks [identified] that pretty much the entire property was on fire,” Stoner said. “The entire roof, porch and garage was on fire.”

Several items in the yard of the home were also engulfed, including a parked vehicle. At some point during the blaze, the roof of the home collapsed. For the next several hours, Stoner said his team worked to gain control of the flames and extinguish them.

Occupants of the home were able to evacuate prior to the fire department’s entry; however, upon arriving on scene, firefighters completed a search to ensure everyone was safe. Meanwhile, others entered the building to begin extinguishing the flames. Much of the department’s time spent at the scene was used to identify hotspots hiding away under rubble and ensure they were fully extinguished.

“It’s a lot easier to put out a fire when the building is still standing,” Stoner said. “You’ve got access to everything, there’s not a lot of hidden compartments. In this instance, the roof burned and caved in across a lot of the residence — now you’ve got void areas where the roof decking came down and the floor space. We’ve got to get in there and remove that roof decking to get down to all the hotspots underneath it.

“When a house burns it drops coals and embers, and the more it burns the thicker that gets. We can spray water on top of it all day long, but there’s so much heat built up in the bottom that if we don’t penetrate down into it, it’ll dry out every bit of water we put into it and reignite.”

By 9 a.m. Monday morning, Houston County Fire was beginning to wrap up, and investigators were starting to identify the cause of the blaze. Very little of the building was left standing.

Stoner told The Journal that the structure was a total loss. Red Cross was sent to the scene to assist the victims of the blaze.

HHJ News