PERU — Fire Chief William Hussey was driving home from a wedding Saturday night when a text popped up on his phone from dispatchers alerting him to a fire at his home address.
Shocked, he turned to his wife and asked her if she had left the iron on, Hussey said. They were about 10 minutes away from home at the time he received the text.
He was relieved to find it was actually an outbuilding at a camp next to his house that had burned. That address, 45 LaPointe Road, wasn’t marked, so the people who had called in the fire had given Hussey’s address instead, he said.
Neighbors on the other side of the camp, construction workers from Alabama who had just arrived home, had smelled smoke and investigated. When they saw the building ablaze, they fought it with a garden hose and had managed to extinguish it by the time fire crews arrived, Hussey said.
Investigators suspect a small grass fire from a day earlier had reignited, burning the building and a set of stairs, Hussey said.
“It was probably 50 feet from my house,” he said.
No injuries were reported.
“It’s quite shocking to see your address to come up on” your cell phone, he said. “Now I know how other people feel” in that situation.
cwilliams@sunjournal.com
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