Candle spawns fire that consumes home

[Times photo: Maurice Rivenbark] Everyone inside escaped the fire Tuesday morning at 4322 Bellaire Drive in Hernando Beach, but firefighters were unable to do anything to save it. The house had just been put on the market, one of the residents said.

By JENNIFER FARRELL and JAMIE JONES
© St. Petersburg Times
published February 6, 2002

HERNANDO BEACH -- By the time Tessie Harris saw the flames, it was already too late.

The small snowball-shaped candle she lit Tuesday morning somehow caught the cloth over her nightstand on fire, and before she could stop it, the flames reached the bedspread.

"I tried to get it out," Harris, 22, said after escaping with her family from the two-story stilt home at 4322 Bellaire Drive in Hernando Beach. "I couldn't get it out. It was going too fast. It's all my fault."

Harris burned her hands and leg trying to extinguish the fire. When she realized it was too much to handle alone, she ran next door in her pajamas for help from neighbor Tim Bourguignon. "By the time I got over there, it was engulfed," Bourguignon said later. "It was rolling right up the side of my house."

Thick clouds of black smoke filled the sky as volunteer firefighters from Hernando Beach battled the blaze with help from Hernando County Fire Rescue. Winds along the coast fanned the flames, which quickly reduced the home to rubble. Harris was treated for minor burns at Oak Hill Hospital.

Hernando Beach Volunteer Fire Department Chief Dan Chichester reported that four of his firefighters were injured.

Three had minor burns and the fourth was struck by flying glass. All refused treatment.

Danny Roberts, Hernando County Fire Rescue Chief of Operations, said one of his firefighters was hospitalized for smoke inhalation.

Harris lived in an apartment downstairs with her 4-year-old daughter, Sky. Neighbors said the child was upstairs with Harris' parents, Billy and Sue, when the fire started. Their 19-year-old son, Jamie, was visiting Bourguignon.

Firefighters scrambled to contain the blaze, bringing it under control by 11:30, about an hour after it started. Heat from the fire melted blinds insided Bourguignon's house, and two windows were blown out as part of the roof caught on fire.

Jamie Harris said his parents had just put their home on the market.

© 2006 • All Rights Reserved • St. Petersburg Times
490 First Avenue South • St. Petersburg, FL 33701 • 727-893-8111

Contact the Times | Privacy Policy
Standard of Accuracy | Terms, Conditions & Copyright