No one was injured when a storage shed fire broke out and quickly spread to a home in Jacksonville yesterday.
The Jacksonville and South Jacksonville Fire Departments responded to a call of a fire at 438 Pine Street in Jacksonville at 12:48 pm Thursday.
Captain Matt Summers with Jacksonville Fire Department says what started as a shed fire call became a house fire when crews arrived six minutes later.
“We responded to a single-story, single-family residence on a report of a shed fire in the backyard, and on arrival, we found that the shed was fully involved and the house was involved as well. The guys made a quick attack of it. We had back up from South Jacksonville as well, several guys on the scene helping us and everything went really well.
The family was out, the pets were all out and we stopped the spread from the main structure but it did get into what once was probably a two or three-car garage that had been converted to a master bedroom and living area. It did get into that from the shed and spread into the structure but we were able to stop it from spreading to the rest of the house and prevented further damage. But overall it was good, no injuries.”
The owner of the home, Roy Flath told investigators that he had left work early and was driving down West Railroad Street when he noticed that his shed was on fire. Flath said he quickly pulled in and went inside to tell his family to get out. The family members inside the home said they didn’t know anything was on fire at the time.
An estimated fifty to sixty thousand dollars in damage was sustained to the structure, with approximately twenty-five thousand in lost contents. Summers says the cause of the fire is undetermined at this time.
He says they do not believe the origin of the fire was suspicious, the shed did contain a large amount of wiring, fuel, and flammables, and the cause remains under investigation.