State law enforcement officials have been called in to assist local authorities in uncovering the cause of the early evening blaze that started shortly before 7 p.m. at the 113 Ellenburg Drive home, Captain Tim Rowland, of the Easley Fire Department, said.
“We received the call at 7:02 (p.m.), so it had been burning sometime before that,” Rowland said. “It hadn’t been burning long, though.”
Firemen, who responded with two pumpers and a service truck, found the home to be heavily burning when they arrived, he said.
The flames were battled for about two hours before firemen could bring the blaze under control, he said.
The agency was on the scene for another hour performing salvage and overhaul operations, he said.
The house was unoccupied when the fire started, but was undergoing renovation work, Rowland said.
Easley Fire Chief Butch Womack said electricity was probably connected to the house, with firemen disconnecting the meter from the home when they arrived.
While the exterior of the building still appears to be intact, the home suffered substantial damage to the interior, he said.
Neighbor Dale Youngs said he and his family were watching the Super Bowl game when they noticed an unusual amount of traffic on the Ellenburg Drive, as well as parking in an empty lot separating the two houses.
“We didn’t know anything was going on because we were watching the game,” Youngs said. “When we looked out, we saw all the cars and then we saw that the house was on fire.”
Youngs said flames had already broken through the roof of the house before emergency personnel arrived.
“The flames were leaping up really high,” he said. “They were going full blast when the fire department arrived.”
Firemen worked to overcome the blaze, and at one point seemed to have extinguished the fire, only to have it erupt a second time, Youngs said.
“The fire was really going at it for a while, and it looked like they had put it out,” he said.
“They had already gone in – you could see the firemen walking around inside with
flashlights,” he said. “Then we could see a glow in the house, and the fire started up
again.
“It was pretty scary,” Youngs said.
The pastor of a Presbyterian church in Berea, Youngs and his family had just relocated to the Easley area from Texas, and had been living near Ellenburg’s old home place for about a year, he said.
The new owners have been renovating the house for about six months, he said.
“They’ve been doing a lot of work over there since around July,” Youngs said. “This is really sad, everything they put into this and now it looks like it is pretty much gutted.
“It’s just really sad,” he said.
Police documents on file with the Easley Police Department show that someone broke into the house Jan. 19.
The new owners had not moved any possessions, appliances, or furniture into the house when the fire struck, Rowland said.
The cause of the fire has not been yet determined, and investigators with the S.C. State Law Enforcement Division have been called in to assist in discovering the fire’s origin, he said.
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