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Fire destroys A-frame house at horse ranch
By DAN DeWITT
© St. Petersburg Times, BROOKSVILLE -- Jill Runkel woke up Sunday morning, as she usually does in the summer, at 3 a.m. to take care of her horses. She then went out and drove on the roads near her home south of Brooksville, looking for a horse's bit she had dropped the day before, and made a coffee run to a nearby convenience store. When Runkel returned to the front gate of her property, just after 6 a.m., "that's when I saw the flames," she said. "The phone is just inside the door and I tried to get to that but I couldn't," she said. She ran to a neighbor's house to call the Fire Department. By the time the first trucks arrived, she said, "the roof had already collapsed." The fire destroyed the wooden, A-frame house at 2583 Saturn Road and all the contents other than a few brown-edged papers salvaged from a filing cabinet. She consoled herself, though, with the thought that her 11-year-old son, Ryan, who usually sleeps in a second-floor loft, was visiting his grandmother in Safety Harbor. "I lost a lot of stuff that can't be replaced, but at least he wasn't there," said Runkel, who boards and raises horses on the 10 acres called Sunspot Ranch. She moved there from Hudson 18 years ago, and, besides her son, raised a daughter there who is now in the Army and stationed in Germany. The fire surged through the house partly because of its construction: awood frame with cedar siding, said Capt. Jack Sanfilippo of Hernando County Fire Rescue. "It had plenty of fuel," he said. "It was a pretty hot fire." The firefighters, assisted by the Brooksville Fire Department, used water from tankers because of the house's remote location; they required more than 20 minutes to get the fire under control and several hours to extinguish it entirely, Sanfilippo said. Runkel said the home had an open interior with a loft. State Fire Marshal Max Melendez Jr. said the fire appeared to start on the west side of the first floor near a couch, lamp and large-screen TV. Melendez said he had not determined a cause of the fire, though he was investigating whether it was related to work recently done on the house's foundation near where the fire started. Runkel doubted this project -- laying concrete blocks -- had caused the blaze. American Red Cross workers had arranged for temporary lodging for Runkel, and she said her house is insured. But late Sunday morning she was just starting to realize all the complications the fire would cause. She has no clothes and very few of the documents from her horse training and boarding business, Sunspot Ranch. She had yet to call her son or to tell her clients what had happened. The fire took her electricity hookup, she said. Without it, she cannot operate the pump to provide the horses with water.
 © 2006 • All Rights Reserved • St. Petersburg Times
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