Firefighters battle blaze at Cape home believed vacant

An early evening fire caused extensive damage to a house on Ellis Street Thursday but resulted in no injuries.

The house at 325 S. Ellis St. was believe to be vacant. Cape Girardeau firefighters responded to the fire call at 5:54 p.m. As a few bystanders watched, the fire department worked to contain the blaze.

One bystander, Karen Shamblin, said she has lived just a few houses down the street for four years. No one had lived in the structure during that time, she said.

Battalion chief John Hinkebein said the fire started on the first floor in the kitchen area at the rear of the house. When firefighters arrived on the scene, flames were leaping from the windows of the room, Hinkebein said.

The fire soon spread to the second floor, where plenty of combustible material such as wooden shingles on the roof helped the fire spread.

Firefighters had stopped the kitchen-area fire in only five or six minutes, Hinkebein said, but the fight upstairs was tougher.

"We couldn't get upstairs easily because the fire in the kitchen area had burned out the steps leading there," he said. After about 10 minutes, the upstairs blaze was also contained, but firefighters had to spend more than an hour making sure any hot spots were out.

Fire chief Rick Ennis said the house sustained a large amount of damage, but the structure could still be saved. Much of the damage, he said, came from fire control measures, as the way the house was constructed allowed the fire to spread into open spaces in the walls. The house had a lot of what Ennis called "void spaces," where the fire could find unseen refuge in spaces between walls and attack the wooden frame, making extinguishing it more difficult.

As of Thursday evening, the owner of the house had not yet been identified. No firefighters were injured.

msanders@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 182