Firefighters Go Through One Roof to Extinguish Fire on Another

Janet Deery thought that someone was playing a trick on her when she heard knocking at her door in the middle of Halloween night. 

Once the person at the door said, “Fire,” she realized it was real.

“When I came out, the flames were just shooting up about 10 feet up in the air,” said Deery, of the house next door.

At approximately 1:30 a.m. on Tuesday, one of Deery’s neighbors on Ducketts Lane called 911 to report a house fire.

The Howard County Department of Fire and Rescue Services, plus firefighters from Anne Arundel and Baltimore County, arrived to find “an end-of-the-row townhouse with fire coming through the roof,” said Battalion Chief Gordon Wallace in a statement released Tuesday.

The house at 6772 Ducketts Lane had been vacant since the summer, said Deery, as a result of foreclosure.

On Tuesday afternoon when Patch visited, the empty home with a burned roof and damaged siding had been posted as uninhabitable.

Deery's home was also posted as uninhabitable "due to minor smoke and roof damage as a result of the fire," wrote Wallace in a statement from the department.

Although she was able to stay at a neighbor's home, Deery said she hopes her house will be back to being “livable” by Howard County’s standards soon, since the only damage was a hole the firefighters created in her roof.

Deery explained that between the townhomes there is “firewall,” a material that prevents fire from spreading; as a result, her home wasn't burned. The damage resulted when firefighters needed to use her house to get to her neighbor's.

“There were dozens of firemen here, and they thought the fire was out," she said.

"Then they waited 20 or 30 minutes, and it was still smoking. They needed a better view to see where the smolders were,” said Deery. “So they had to make a hole in my roof to be able to put out the fire completely.”

Wallace said that the cause of the fire was unknown.