Fire destroys Albemarle home

A blaze demolished an Albemarle County home late Friday night, but firefighters brought it under control before it spread to nearby houses.
The blaze on Brown-stone Lane in the Still Meadow subdivision managed to melt the vinyl siding off a nearby home and badly damaged the siding on another.
Scott Kirkpatrick had just moved into the next-door house that had its siding melted off. He said the fire woke him and his wife.

“We heard the water hitting the window and then woke up,” Kirkpatrick said. “Everything was orange.”
The couple could feel the two-alarm fire’s heat through their window, he said.
Firefighters were spraying Kirkpatrick’s house to keep the fire from spreading, said Doug Smythers, chief of the Seminole Trail Volunteer Fire Department.
When the first crews arrived at the scene about 11 p.m., flames were shooting 35 to 40 feet above the house’s roof, and the front of the house was engulfed in flames, he said.
If the siding on Kirkpatrick’s house had caught fire, things could have been much worse, Smythers said.
“If it gets to the right temperature, it just ignites and burns like gasoline,” he said.

Firefighter’s first priority was preventing the fire’s spread, and they then worked to reduce the blaze itself, Smythers said.
The first crews to arrive at the scene had to have reinforcements to bring the blaze under control. In all, about 40 fire and rescue personnel responded, Smythers said.
“We don’t expect to come to one quite ripping like this,” the chief said.
The new-style construction used in the last 10 or 15 years to construct homes such as the one that burned Friday night was a contributing factor in the fire’s rapid spread and fierce strength, Smythers said.

Corbin Snow, who lives across the street from the burned home, was alerted to the fire when he heard children yelling in the street, he said.
He called the home’s owner, Earl Burton, who told him that no people or animals were in the structure, though vehicles were parked in the driveway, Snow said.
Fire officials were still investigation the cause of the fire.
Albemarle County tax records value the home, which was almost completely destroyed in the fire, at roughly $400,000.