VIDEO: See the damage caused by Wednesday night's fire. Check out the video at the bottom of this post.
ComEd officials have no immediate explanation for why power lines serving a residential neighborhood in northwest La Grange fell to the ground Wednesday night, sparking a fire that destroyed two garages and three automobiles, according to a company spokeswoman.
No one was injured in the incident in which a transformer atop a utility pole also exploded at the scene, located on the north side of Bell Ave between Edgewood and Malden Aves, La Grange Chief David Fleege said.
Some 1,200 homes in La Grange and Western Springs lost power as a result of the incident, Pam Anton, a media relations manager for ComEd, said Thursday afternoon, at which time she also said that only 18 customers remained without service and they were expected to be back on line by the end of the business day. Most homes had power restored with two hour of the initial outage, Anton said.
But one resident who lives on Dover Ave, Ed Pech, said the homes on his block lost power a second time around 6:30 Thursday evening. He decided to take refuge at Starbucks in downtown La Grange to escape the extreme heat that smothered the Chicago area for most of the day.
A large but unknown number of homes near the accident scene also lost cable television and internet service.
Kevin Shields, who lives on Drexel Ave three blocks from source of the problem, said his Comcast service was not restored until around 10:00 p.m. Thursday night. But his electric service was never disrupted, he said.
Those residents suffering the greatest loss and discomfort of course were the owners of the two garages where flames from the fire Wednesday night surged above the treetops and formed a wall 50 feet wide, according to one witness.
Fleege said his firefighters, who responded to the alarm at 8:27 p.m., could not tackle the fire until ComEd crews arrived nearly an hour later to cut off power to the downed lines. Instead, they used their hoses to create walls of water to keep the fire from spreading to the houses.
That effort was largely successful. The home at 132 Malden Ave suffered only minor damage as the heat melted its vinyl soffit and cracked two windows. The second home at 131 N Edgewood Ave, whose owners had recently completed a two-story addition, was unscathed. Both garages, however, were completely consumed by the fire.
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