"Looks like a flaming basketball" the homeowner said after watching a neighbor's Ring camera footage
A meteor may be to blame after a home in Northern California burned to the ground over the weekend.
On Friday night, firefighters from the Penn Valley Fire Department in Nevada County responded to a structure fire at the home of Dustin Procita. They fought the blaze for around four hours.
“I heard a big bang,” Procita told KCRA. “I started to smell smoke. I went onto my porch and it was completely engulfed in flames.”
While Procita was able to escape with one of his two dogs, the other perished in the fire.
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Around the same time as the blaze, witnesses described seeing a bright ball of light in the sky, which was also captured in nearby Ring camera footage. “Oh wow, looks like a flaming basketball coming out of this sky,” said Procita when he saw the video for himself (above).
“They said it was a meteor,” Procita told KCRA about what possibly started the fire. “I’ve always watched meteor showers and stuff as a kid, but I definitely didn’t look forward to them landing in my yard or through my roof. I did not see what it was, but from everybody I talked to — was a flaming ball falling from the sky, landed in that general area.”
The Southern Taurids meteor shower did take place over the weekend — or “Halloween fireballs” as NASA calls them.
As the Penn Valley Fire Department investigates what started the inferno — which could take up to two weeks — Captain Josh Miller said he too heard talk of a “meteorite, asteroid — one of those two.”
“I had one individual tell me about it first and like, okay, I’ll put that in the back of my mind. But then more people — two, three or four more started coming in and talking about it,” he told the outlet.
Dustin’s mother started a GoFundMe for her son and his wife, saying the pair “lost everything” in the fire. “It was a a total loss,” she added, saying the pair don’t have homeowner’s or fire insurance “due to the rural area they live in and the exorbitantly high premiums.”
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