BEL AIR, Md. — Just as he was retiring to bed, Brian Adkins heard the sound of thunder booming outside his Bel Air home, and moments later, his wife yelled to him from the ground floor that the garage was on fire.
“So I came running down,” said Adkins, “I have the hose right here, and there was flames all back there, and all I did was take the hose and keep the fire contained and keep it out.”
Once firefighters arrived on the scene, it only took them about five minutes to extinguish the flames.
“What caused the fire was actually the lightning traveling through his electrical wiring, maybe even some piping into his home striking a power strip, which surged, ignited nearby combustibles and of course that spread to other items in the garage,” said Sr. Deputy State Fire Marshal Oliver Alkire.
Now, Adkins is looking at a lengthy repair and damage estimated at $50,000, but he’s counting himself lucky, since he saved his beloved Harley from the garage and kept the fire from spreading—-all thanks to his wife’s vigilance in the midst of the storm.
“It was funny, because I told my wife, ‘Come on. Let’s go to bed.’ She’s like, ‘No. I’m going to watch the news. I want to see what’s going on with the storms, because all the alerts went off for a tornado.’ She’s like, ‘I’m going to see what happens with that.’, and then that’s what happened,” said Adkins, “I went to bed and she came back down, and then she’s hollering at me to get up because the garage is on fire.”
