AUGUSTA — A home on Pleasant Hill Road was seriously damaged Friday after a misfired firework end up traveling up the metal roof and ending up under the ridge cap.
“It’s almost impossible. The odds of that happening are slim to none,” Jason Farris, battalion chief at the Augusta Fire Department, said Monday. “I don’t know how else you can have the fire we had without that happening. It was astronomical odds that that could happen.”
Farris said the call came in Friday just after 9 p.m. and just before Augusta’s fireworks display was scheduled to start. When crews arrived at 106 Pleasant Hill Road, flames were coming out of the peak of the roof from one end of the double-wide mobile home to the other.
The home originally had an asphalt roof, over which strapping a metal roof had been installed, Farris said, and the fire was burning in the void between the two layers.
“There was not way to get to it without a rivet gun, which is not plausible when the roof is on fire and you’re in fire gear trying to open it up,” he said.
He said firefighters tried to avoid having to go inside the house to keep damage to a minimum, but eventually, they had to pull down the ceiling around the peak of the roof from inside to knock the fire down. About three-quarters of the roof trusses were compromised.
While the roof didn’t provide a lot of fuel for the fire, Farris said a lot of both manufactured and stick-built homes are built with roof trusses made with gusset or connection plates holding the parts of the trusses together.
“It’s essentially a plate full of staples or small nails in glue. For snow load, they work well,” he said.
But heat, including the intense heat from a firework, causes the plates to fail quickly and almost at the exact same time, he said, and that leaves about five minutes to figure out what to do.
“I think his TV was right under the peak,” he said. “I would say that probably isn’t going to work. But other than that, we were able to salvage pretty much everything for them.”
Augusta real estate records show that William Creed and Kevin Curlew own the home, which with the property is on is valued for taxation purposes at $92,600.
Attempts to reach them Monday were not immediately successful.
Fire crews from Togus, Chelsea and Vassalboro responded, with additional departments providing station coverage at Augusta’s fire stations.