Upper Southampton Township, Pa. fire leaves resident, animals dead

UPPER SOUTHAMPTON TWP., Pennsylvania (WPVI) -- Upper Southampton Township fire officials are searching for answers related to a house fire that took the life of one person and multiple animals.

Just before midnight Friday night going into Saturday, a fire consumed a home on Wendy Drive in Upper Southampton Township.

In surveillance video obtained by Action News, you can see the flames and police scrambling to alert next-door neighbors to evacuate.

"I couldn't even make it down my street, the entire street was blocked off," said neighbor Tim Donovan. "Neighbors were everywhere, police, fire trucks everywhere. It was a lot of commotion."

Ten fire companies responded to a "well advanced" fire on the first and second floors.

"We already had fire through the roof at that point and fire coming out the second-floor windows and a fire coming out the first floor," said Upper Southampton Township Fire Chief Glenn McKenney. "It was well involved when we got here."

Fire officials said they had trouble accessing the front of the house because of the overgrown brush, so they had to cut into the fence of the next-door neighbor in order to access the backyard. Officials call it a heavy content house, meaning there were a lot of contents in the front and backyards that made it difficult to fight the fire.

"This was a really intense fire, I mean the conditions were untenable for even firefighters to be inside," said McKenney.

Officials got the fire under control in about two hours but stayed on the scene for four hours. They discovered one body inside as well as the bodies of multiple animals.

"It's just very sad and you don't see this stuff too often," said Donovan.

Neighbors call the situation tragic and some think it could have been prevented.

"It might not have spread the way it did because it happened so fast because of all the stuff, and if you look in the backyard, there's a pile of stuff that they swept out of it," said neighbor Michelle Lubrant.

Officials are not sure if there were working smoke detectors at the time because the house had so much extensive damage.

The cause of the fire is under investigation.