A house fire in the town of Moreau killed a married couple late Tuesday night.
On Thursday, Cretta Burchard was planting flowers for her neighbor Linda Carpenter, whose family had owned the property and had been renting it to the deceased couple prior to the blaze.
“It used to be Linda’s father owned the farm that was next door and raised dairy cows. When we moved here, that’s what it was. It was very rural. You knew what time it was by who went down the road. So, she was born and raised there and it’s very emotional for her,” said Burchard.
Approached by WAMC, Carpenter declined to comment.
Burchard has lived just a few doors down from the now-charred home for 45 years. The structure, which had previously been a farmhouse for a local family, had stood for 80 years. She says she didn’t initially realize the scope of the emergency.
“Well, first of all, when the trucks came, it was from the North end of the road. So all of them had to go by our house. When the first two went by we said ‘eh.’ By the time we got to 10 or 11 it was amazing, we actually got up and sat on our front porch. We couldn’t see anything down here but we thought what we were seeing was the glow of the emergency flasher lights in the sky. I did not realize it was a fire. And it wasn’t actually until yesterday, during the day, what had happened next door. And we pretty much stayed away from all of it to let everybody do their job,” said Burchard.
Burchard says Old Saratoga Road, just south of Glens Falls, was completely blocked by emergency vehicles.
“There has been so much development around here, you hear things all the time, day and night. Like I said it wasn’t until the second or third truck came on down through that we knew something was majorly wrong,” said Burchard.
A spokesman for the state police tells WAMC responders were able to remove one individual from the fire after arriving around 11 p.m. After the fire was put out, officials say another body was found inside the building.
A firefighter from the South Glens Falls Fire Department also sustained non-life-threatening injuries while responding to the incident.
The cause of the fire has not yet been determined, though state fire inspectors say an investigation is ongoing.
