By Ethan Wilensky-Lanford
The Concord Monitor
BELMONT, N.H. — A two-story house on Durrell Mountain Road in Belmont burned yesterday morning, displacing a couple.
No one was injured in the three-alarm fire, which destroyed the home. Its cause had not been determined yesterday.
“We’re going to be interviewing everybody at this point,” said Belmont Fire Department Deputy Chief Sean McCarty.
The Belmont Fire Department asked the town’s police department to help find Edward Weber, whose parents live at the house. Weber was at the fire when it started but left before firefighters and investigators arrived, said Fire Chief Jim Davis. The fire was reported by a truck driver working for Stafford Oil. None of the family members or neighbors reported the fire before firefighters arrived, Davis said.
Edward Weber’s mother, Louise Weber, was also in the house when the fire began. She was running on a treadmill in the family’s computer room, she said, when her son ran into the room.
“He said, ‘The house is on fire. You’ve got to get out,’ ” she said.
Louise Weber is legally blind, according to her family. She lost her glasses in the fire.
Her husband, Eric Palmer, was at work at Cantin Chevrolet Cadillac in Laconia when the fire started. His brother called him and said he had heard on a police scanner that Palmer’s neighbor’s house was on fire. Eric Palmer tried to call home but could not reach his wife. Laconia Fire Chief Kenneth Erickson called him soon after and put his wife on the phone. She told him that it was in fact their house that had burned.
“She said the house was gone,” he said.
Palmer said he drove home and found the house fully engulfed. Davis said that it was a total loss.
The couple bought the house and moved there from Epping with three children in 1977. The wood-frame house was built 10 years earlier.
The Lakes Region Mutual Fire Aid dispatch center received the call from the oil company at 8:45 a.m. Belmont and Laconia crews responded first. When the firefighters arrived, they believed that a disabled person could still be in the house and entered with the double task of conducting a search and trying to extinguish the flames.
“They took a beating,” Davis said. “The first crews did an excellent job stopping the fire. We had a lot of volume when we got here.”
Meanwhile, Erickson found Louise Weber a short distance away.
In all, 11 departments plus a private ambulance service and Lakes Region Mutual Fire Aid helped fight the fire, which was brought under control by 10:15 a.m.
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