Firefighters battle house fire near Mundelein
Wearing a lone sandal, the other foot bare, Ignazio Lucente stood on the front lawn of his spacious Mundelein area house Friday afternoon and watched it burn.
"Everything is destroyed in the house," Lucente said into his cell phone watching firefighters swarm the property. "Between the smoke and the smell and the water, everything's shot."
Lucente's home on the 21300 block of West Route 60 was damaged by a fire that started in a house under construction two doors away. The partially built house was destroyed.
A large storage building between the two houses was singed, too.
Trees and underbrush in the heavily wooded area were smoldering throughout the afternoon, ignited by embers from the fire. Firefighters ran from spot to spot, extinguishing the blazes.
No one was hurt in the 2 p.m. fire, the cause of which was not immediately known.
A neighbor said the house where the fire started was unoccupied and hadn't been worked on for about a year.
The fire quickly ravaged the structure, bringing it to the ground, authorities said.
Smoke from the blaze, first dark and then cloudy white, rose into the air and was visible more than a mile away.
The heat from the blaze damaged a storage building at John and Kim Abraham's house, just to the south. The Abraham's house was not burned, however.
Instead, the flames jumped to Lucente's house, just south of the Abrahams' property.
Kim Abraham said her house was spared because of the family's Christian faith.
"I pray a lot," she said. "I know God protects us."
Firefighters from the Countryside Fire Protection District, Mundelein, Libertyville, Grayslake and the Lincolnshire-Riverwoods Fire Protection District were among those on the scene.
In addition to the fire and smoke, they had to contend with the sweltering heat, Countryside Assistant Chief Chris Kazian said.
"It's hot out here today, but we're trying to get water into them," Kazian said. "We need to keep rotating personnel and make sure they keep hydrated."
Several major intersections near the fire were blocked off by police and public works crews, causing some traffic backups.