THRALL — The occupants of a property in the 200 block of U.S. 79 hit by an early morning blaze managed to escape without injury, but the site sustained heavy damages and left them with nothing, the homeowner said.
A GoFundMe campaign has been set up at https:// gofund.me/dea2fbf0 to help those displaced by the fire, which took multiple agencies to extinguish.
“This was a complete loss,” said Mark Moellenberg, fire chief for Williamson County Emergency Services District No. 10.
“The home was completely lost. The belongings were completely lost. This was bad as far as the house and belongings … Fortunately, everyone escaped the fire safely, so nobody was injured and we are very thankful for that,” he added.
Though Moellenberg said there is an investigation into the cause, homeowner Melinda Pierritz believes a fire in a homemade wood-burning stove got out of control.
“It got red hot, and it made the house catch on fire,” Pierritz said.
Pierritz said everything she had, as well as that of a friend who lived in an RV on the property, is gone.
This is the second blaze to affect the RV owner, according to Pierritz.
“My whole life was in that house,” Pierritz said. “Rick Weatherford … he just lost everything a little over a year ago to a house fire in Granger, and he had just started to finally have something and move on from that, and now he’s lost everything again.”
Moellenberg said the call came in at 7:40 a.m. Sunday and required the help of Taylor and Hutto fire departments, as well as the Weir Volunteer Fire Department as backup.
“We had, I think, our first person on the scene, and it had a six-minute response time,” Moellenberg said. “The house was fully engulfed on our arrival. It took a little over three hours to extinguish it.”
With the advent of colder weather and a freeze starting Thursday night, the chief said it is important for people to remain aware of heightened fire dangers.
“Be very careful, have a (carbon monoxide) monitor present, and make sure to have proper venting,” he said. “It’s going to be cold here at the end of the week and through the Christmas holiday ... We want to really stress that people should be very careful with their heating appliances, space heaters, wood burning and any kind of open flame heating devices.”
