By Clay Bailey
The Commercial Appeal (Tennessee)
Copyright 2006 The Commercial Appeal, Inc.
Sunday evening’s lightning storm started a blaze that heavily damaged a Germantown Station home.
No one was injured in the fire at 2900 Leesburg, which was part of a crush of calls to the Germantown Fire Department as thunderstorms moved through the area.
Germantown firefighters were spread so thin at the time that the Collierville, Bartlett and Shelby County fire departments responded to Germantown’s call for mutual assistance.
“We were running all over the place,” Assistant Fire Chief John Selberg said.
The city answered six calls in just over 30 minutes, most of them caused by lightning. One of those calls went outside the city where Germantown helped Shelby County respond to an alarm at Buffalo Wild Wings at 3770 Hacks Cross. The restaurant was open for business Tuesday.
The house on Leesburg at the corner of Savannah Way was the most seriously damaged. The flames were so visible that the department received a call to a second address in the area only to find the caller had seen the flames from the Leesburg fire.
“It was pretty heavy and loud,” said Mary Herzog, who lives on Leesburg near the damaged house. “We heard the thunder and lightning but didn’t realize it had hit the house until the fire trucks came.”
No one was home at the time, said owner Mary Colabufo, but she was still looking for at least one of her pets - a 3-year-old brown and white Shitzu.
Colabufo said workers were evaluating the damage Monday afternoon, but she could provide no immediate information about the extent of the loss.
The Leesburg call came in about 7:40 p.m. Sunday at a time when previous calls for lightning strikes had fire units spread across the suburb.
Selburg says such strikes “are unpredictable” and require extensive investigation.
The first firefighters on the scene were a reserve assistant chief who lives in the area, an emergency medical services supervisor and a truck leaving another lightning call on Windy Oaks. Germantown equipment continued to arrive, along with engines from Collierville, Shelby County and Bartlett.
“Due to the intensity and heavy involvement of the fire, crews had to be backed out of the interior of the fire and aerial streams used to extinguish much of the body of the fire,” Selberg wrote in his report.
Firefighters did not get the fire under control until about an hour after it was reported. They remained on the scene until 11:21 p.m., according to department reports.
By Monday’s light, the damage was even more apparent. A large portion of the roof had collapsed from the fire damage and water used to fight the fire. There were shattered windows, a charred exterior and twisted sections of gutter in the yard.