Estimated read time: 1-2 minutes
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
WEST VALLEY CITY — A fire ripped through a vacant home Sunday morning, causing as much as $100,000 in damage.
Firefighters responded around 7:15 a.m. to 2900 W. Lehman Ave. to find a burning home immediately behind an apartment complex, said West Valley Fire Battalion Chief Jed Peters.
The home's only access point is through the apartment complex, so it required extra time to both locate the fire and get to it, particularly after the wrong address was called into dispatchers, Peters said.
"It was well-involved by the time we got here," he said. "It took us quite awhile to get it out."
Peters noted that additions to the home, namely "roofs built on top of roofs," also made the fire difficult to combat.
"It was kind of just one of those stubborn fires that took us awhile to get into the void spaces to get everything put out," he said.
Peters said the home, which had been vacant for "at least several months," was considered a total loss. He estimated the total damage at between $75,000 and $100,000.
The cause of the fire was not immediately known, though Peters said it appears it started outside on a porch, "then moved inside before we got here."
Nobody was inside the home at the time.
"It does look like since it was abandoned for so long that some other people might have taken up residency in it. … We haven't been able to find any of those people to ask them what was going on recently in the home," Peters said.
None of the approximately 30 firefighters who responded to the home suffered injuries, he said.
