Fire destroys home in rural area

Jace Radke

Friday, Jan. 22, 1999 | 11:43 a.m.

All Jay Vaughn could do was watch as his son-in-law's home in the extreme southern end of the Las Vegas Valley burned to the ground Thursday afternoon.

"Fire hydrants are one of the things you give up when you live out here in the country," Vaughn said as flames licked around the home's concrete walls. "Just down the street there is a million-dollar house that probably would have gone up faster than this one."

The lack of fire hydrants in rural areas of the valley is not a new problem, and it's something that residents of sparsely populated areas have to learn to live without until construction catches up with them.

Thursday's fire at 12890 S. Paradise Road, south of the intersection of Lake Mead Drive and Las Vegas Boulevard South, destroyed the house as Clark County firefighters shuttled water back and forth to the scene.

"We have to deal with this all the time when we have fires in the rural areas of town," department spokesman Steve La-Sky said. "There are no hydrants out here, and no water.

"Our engines carry about 500 gallons of water, and when they run out we have to shuttle water to them with other engines."

Water was shuttled from a mobile home park several miles away from the house fire on Paradise that started a little before 4 p.m., La-Sky said.

The fire may have started somewhere in a chimney connected to a wood-burning stove, the home's owner, Wes Utzman, told La-Sky.

"I went inside and found that the fire was in the attic," Utzman said. "I had started a fire in the wood stove earlier."

There were no injuries and an exact cause is still under investigation.

High winds made the fire hard to fight and made defending a next-door home a top priority, La-Sky said.

"There is a car about 40 feet from the house and it's just gutted from the fire," La-Sky said. "The wind is really kicking the fire up so we set up in a defensive position to contain it."