“There’s a lot of collapse, there’s a lot of fire there, so it’s hard to see exactly what happened, how it started,” Mercer said. “We don’t have that answer yet.”
The chief said there “was too much fire” to enter the building, so they attacked the fire from the outside, “and then they went inside to do the overhaul and the cleanup.”
Mercer said the department’s fire investigators will “have some work to do to figure out exactly what happened,” but right now it’s undetermined.
“We don’t have a good idea on that just yet,” he said.
Bekim Asllani rented the house out and said the occupant was to be evicted Tuesday.
Asllani believes the house is a total loss.
“It’s pretty bad,” he said. “I don’t think it’s safe to live there.”
Photographer Nick Graham contributed to this story.
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