House in Miami Township total loss after 2nd fire is less than 3 months – WHIO TV 7 and WHIO Radio

News Center 7′s Brandon Lewis says the homeowners also had a fire back in March and on top of that, Friday’s fire left the house a skeleton of what it used to be.

It used to be a two-story house, but images Sky 7 show the house suffered heavy damage.

“(Firefighters) did have heavy fire conditions on arrival,” said Steve Johnson, Miami Valley Fire District Battalion Chief. “There wasn’t a whole we could do so obviously it’s heavily, heavily damaged.”

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Lewis spoke with David Hiehle. He saw smoke and flames from his home as he was mowing the grass Friday afternoon.

“Black smoke rolling above the trees, so I turned the mower off,” he said. “My neighbor and I come running over across the street to see if it was a house, a car, what was going on and then that’s when the police came around the corner and then the fire trucks finally got here.”

Johnson said what firefighters had to deal with was dangerous.

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“Upon my arrival, the walls were collapsing on the outside, so you can see it was a two-story house, so you can see most of those walls have collapsed outwards,” he told Lewis. “So, we have to keep everybody away, so they don’t get crushed with the falling brick”

Johnson said the investigation will focus on where he believes the fire may have started. Homeowners were working on tearing the home down after another fire earlier in the year and were trying to remove things from the garage.

“As the firemen were trying to make entry into the house, the conditions were so intense in the garage that the struts and the supports for the floor had started to collapse into the garage,” he said Friday.

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Lewis says sirens can be heard in Ring-Doorbell footage obtained by News Center 7 and there was black smoke billowing into the sky.

Neighbors are glad no one was in the home when the fire happened Friday but are sad to see what happened to the house.

“It still amazes me that brick house brunt like that,” said Hiehle. “Looking at the flames and the smoke, I would’ve never thought a brick house would burn like that.”

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Lewis said a firefighter suffered minor injuries but did not go to the hospital.

The cause of Friday’s fire remains under investigation.

News Center 7 is also working to learn what caused the fire back in March.