Christmas Night Fire Heavily Damages Sandy Hook House

By Andrew Gorosko

Fire Marshal Bill Halstead said this week that fire officials are probing the cause of an apparently accidental blaze that extensively damaged an eight-room Colonial-style house on Christmas night at 57 Osborn Hill Road in Sandy Hook, resulting in the Russo family having to find lodgings elsewhere.

Mr Halstead, who also is Sandy Hook’s fire chief, said that members of the Russo family were returning home at about 10 pm, when they used a remote control to open one of the doors on the family’s two-bay garage, which is enclosed within the bottom level of the structure, and found the garage to be ablaze. Family members had been away from the house since about 4:20 pm, he said.

Although the specific cause of the fire has yet to determined, the blaze appears to have accidentally started in the garage, said Chief Halstead. One small SUV was parked in the garage at the time of the fire, he said. The 2,800-square-foot house was built in 1986.

Town fire officials are awaiting the property owners’ insurance firm bringing equipment to the fire scene to shore up a collapsed section of the house, plus remove the damaged vehicle from the wreckage, Chief Halstead said. When fire investigators are able to get inside the heavily damaged section of the building, they will be better able to probe the cause of the blaze, he said.   

The extensive fire and smoke damage to the wood-frame structure may result in the property owners’ insurance firm declaring it a total loss, the fire chief said. A damage estimate was not available.

The incident resulted in a couple of firefighters receiving minor injuries, Chief Halstead said.

On arriving at the scene, firefighters found both the interior and exterior of the house ablaze. It took about 35 minutes to control the fire, and another 35 minutes to extinguish it, Chief Halstead said. About 55 firefighters responded to the call.

Sandy Hook, Newtown Hook & Ladder, Botsford, Hawleyville, Dodgingtown, Stevenson, and Southbury firefighters responded to the incident. Firefighters ferried water to the fire from a pond near the intersection of Great Ring Road and Bradley Lane, a distance of more than two miles. There are no fire hydrants in the area near the fire.

“It was a tough fire to fight. We had a lot of fire to fight when we got there. [The fire] was inside and outside … It was pretty bad,” he said.

The four-member Russo family has made arrangements to stay elsewhere because their heavily damaged house is uninhabitable. The family is comprised of father James, mother Roseann, son James who is age 14, and daughter Nicole who is age 10, the fire chief said.

On returning to find the house ablaze, a family member was able to save some pet guinea pigs, he added.

On Christmas night in 2007, an estimated 50 volunteer firefighters responded to a raging house fire that destroyed a two-story, wood-frame house amid the rugged terrain of Maplewood Terrace in the Pootatuck Park section of Sandy Hook.