Flaming radio causes fire

Pedestrians on Bouquet Street could smell Chris Miller’s yellow-brick house before they could… Pedestrians on Bouquet Street could smell Chris Miller’s yellow-brick house before they could see it.

The smell of smoke and burned tar filled the block of South Bouquet Street between Joncaire and Bates streets Thursday, after a fire gutted Miller’s house that morning.

“If my stuff’s going to go down in flames, that was a cool way to do it,” said Miller, who explained that, less than a minute after he and the other four men in his house escaped, the fire caught a gas pipe and spewed fireballs out of the house.

“It was nuts,” he said later that day. “Our house went up in 10 minutes — completely.”

At about 8 a.m. Thursday, Miller heard a popping noise, which he said was loud enough to wake him up despite his closed door and loud fan. Emerging from his ground-floor bedroom, Miller ran downstairs to find the remains of a radio, smoldering in the bathroom.

“A pile of goo” by the time he got there, the radio had been sitting by the bathroom door, Miller said, explaining that it must have shot across the room to where he found it.

After failing to smother the fire with towels, Miller attempted to douse the flames, which had begun to lick the ceiling. Realizing that he could not put out the fire, Miller ran upstairs to alert his roommates.

The men gathered up some clothes and contacted the fire department before exiting the house, Miller said, adding that they managed to save about 20 to 30 percent of their things.

According to Francis Deleonibus, the captain in charge of investigation for the Pittsburgh Bureau of Fire, the radio, which was not plugged in Thursday morning, did not cause the fire. Investigators were able to find the remains of an electric, battery-operated razor, which Deleonibus said might have begun the fire.

“The device itself may have failed,” Deleonibus said, explaining that the house’s wiring system appeared relatively new and did not cause the fire. Plugging too many devices into a circuit or using a large number of extension cords or power strips can be particularly dangerous in older houses, such as many of those found in Oakland, Deleonibus explained.

“When those houses were wired, lord knows how many years ago, we didn’t have all the appliances we have today,” Deleonibus said.

“Be careful about how many of those devices you plug in at one time,” he added.

Deleonibus also recommended that students purchase smoke detectors, or ask landlords to install them.

“Fortunately, the guys woke up from the smoke,” he said. “That doesn’t happen most of the time — most people sleep through the smoke.”

Although Miller said he did not know his landlord, Theodore Krellner, who is listed as the owner on the Allegheny County Real Estate Web site, said one of the tenants had contacted him in the late afternoon Thursday. Krellner, who has owned the house at 335 S. Bouquet Street since January 1999, according to the Web site, said the house was in good condition. He could not remember exactly the last time he was in the house, but he said it had probably been between three and six months earlier.

Krellner declined to say how many properties he owned, though he confirmed that all his properties are in South Oakland. According to the real estate Web site, Krellner owns seven, including the property that burned Thursday. Five of the properties are on Bouquet Street, and the other two are within a block of it, according to the Web site. Allegheny County’s real estate ratings of Krellner’s property conditions ranged from “fair” to “very good,” with the 335 S. Bouquet Street property receiving a “fair” rating. The building, which was built around the turn of the 20th century, was valued at $23,200 in the 2002 countywide property assessment, according to the Web site.

Krellner said that he has never had a problem with fire on his property in the past. He said he occasionally had problems, but could not specify the sort and said that, in general, things were “pretty good.”

Miller, a wrestler and sophomore history and archeology major at Pitt, was living in the house this summer with two other Pitt student-wrestlers and another friend. All of Miller’s roommates, as well as a roommate’s friend, were staying in the house at the time of the fire. Members of the house needing lodging, including Miller, who is taking classes at Pitt this summer, were allowed to stay for free in Pitt’s Litchfield Tower C for one week, before being asked to begin paying rent or move out, Miller said.

Pitt does not have an official policy for dealing with students who have lost their homes in fires, according to Pitt spokesman John Fedele, but he said that the University tries to provide emergency assistance in such situations.

Miller said that no one was seriously hurt, but that some of the roommates suffered from smoke inhalation, and that he had sustained a minor burn from his firefighting effort, which he later said was probably not the wisest course of action. He said that the firefighters arrived quickly and seemed to do a good job, and he also credited Pitt police with handling the situation well. The three wrestlers received money from the NCAA’s Student-Athlete Opportunity Fund, while Pitt Police Chief Tim Delaney gave the other men some money to help them get through the next few days, Fedele said.