READING, Pa. – Officials in Reading say electrical issues and subsequent fires left several homes on Marion Street unsafe for people to live in.<\/p>\n
The fires broke out over the weekend, and investigators are still looking for answers.<\/p>\n
“All of a sudden we heard the fire trucks coming, and what was once two fire trucks became a whole block of fire trucks,” says Mike Feltenberger, a Marion Street resident.<\/p>\n
Feltenberger was home when the fires broke out across the street.<\/p>\n
“We were worried because we didn’t really know; we actually thought it was arson,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Reading Fire Marshal Jeremy Searfoss says the first fire broke out at 1035 and 1037 Marion Street.<\/p>\n
“We gained information after we cleared the scene that our firefighters, when they were putting ladders up against the building, they believed that they were getting electricity coming through those ladders,” says Searfoss.<\/p>\n
A separate call came in later that day for fires at 1039 and 1049 on the same block.<\/p>\n
“So, to have fire that is in two different buildings that is not connected is very rare,” says Searfoss.<\/p>\n
Investigators and the electric company say electrical issues likely caused the metal cladding covering the wood along the houses to become energized when the fires happened.<\/p>\n
“It could be individual wiring that’s not properly grounded in the house itself that’s energizing other components, and then it just simply follows the path of least resistance,” says Searfoss.<\/p>\n
Four houses along the Marion St. stretch of homes have signs on the doors condemning them. People residing in the homes say they aren’t sure when or if they’ll be able to get back in.<\/p>\n
“There were a couple kids in that house, and they got to worry about, I guess, getting everything ready for school because school will be starting soon,” says Feltenberg.<\/p>\n
Searfoss says the buildings need to be repaired and deemed safe by an electrical inspector before they can be occupied.<\/p>\n
The cause of the fires is still under investigation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"READING, Pa. – Officials in Reading say electrical issues and subsequent fires left several homes on Marion Street…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":267843,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[68776,112912,112914,19144,57630,66513,5612,112913,736,128,130,129,112915],"class_list":["post-267842","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-reading","tag-building-safety","tag-electrical-fire","tag-electrical-issues","tag-evacuation","tag-fire-investigation","tag-fire-trucks","tag-house-fire","tag-marion-street","tag-reading","tag-reading-city","tag-reading-city-headlines","tag-reading-city-news","tag-uninhabitable-homes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267842","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=267842"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267842\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/267843"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=267842"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=267842"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=267842"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}