7/26//01 approx. 5:45 p.m. Fire dept.arrives. Taken from the main driveway before you get to
the house (behind the trees). At this point the firefighters think it is a brush fire. Only when they had
used most of their water did they realize that there was a house there and it was on fire. (We live
in the country and thus there are no fire hydrants.) We were out of town when it burned.
Early in the fire -- It started in the garage (right), which is already gone.
The garage, where the fire was started by a handyman. Deliberate? The Texas
State Arson Investigator
thought so. And our neighbor said when she she saw the smoke she ran over and
found our handyman
standing in the driveway smoking a cigarette watching it burn. He told her he
had called the fire
department, but there is no record of his call. He returned in the evening several
hours later, was
questioned by the police as to why he was there and said that we had "exotic
plants" that needed
to be watered every few hours. That was a baldfaced lie.
The handyman, whom we are certain started the fire deliberately, lived in a
rented singlewide
trailer and did not have two nickels to his name. The Sheriff, who wanted to
prosecute him,
told us it wasn't worth the effort, that (1) arson is almost impossible to prove,
and (2) this
deadbeat had no money to repay us anyway.
We learned that there is no legal process to protect others from this arsonist;
not even a legal process
that would give him a record someone could look up before they hire him. So
he is now advertising
his services, working for others and waiting for the right time to strike.
This is an aerial photo. The front of the house is at the bottom, garage on the right. The large lilly
pond is visible at the front of the house. The white areas are rock. Another aerial photo:
This one is also taken from the front of the house. The gazebo is off the deck on the left (both
were untouched).
About 40 firefighters worked for several hours but they could not save the
house. The Kerrville F.D. truck
only had a 500 gallon capacity. They are only trained to pull water from hydrants,
so when their 500 gals.
were gone they
were helpless until the Tierra Linda F.D. arrived with tankers. Tierra Linda
has the ability to
"draft," which is to pump water from a stream or
pond into their tankers. Kerrville FD isn't equipped to do this.
Once Tierra Linda arrived there was ample water, especially, later when they
pumped directly from our 2 acre pond
to the Kerrville pumper.
They put approx. 100,000 gallons of water on the fire. They did save our office and neighbors' homes.
A neighbor who watched it burn said, "They poured huge amounts of water on the fire, and it just made no
difference at all. They might as well have been spitting on it."