Candle started fatal house fire

By Glen Atwell
A FATAL blaze that destroyed a house and killed one of its elderly occupants in Clyde on Friday night was caused by an aromatic candle.
Police said there were no suspicious circumstances surrounding the Manks Road inferno, which killed a woman in her 80s between 9.30pm and 10pm.
Fifty fire fighters battled the blaze, which started in a front bedroom of the weatherboard house that was occupied by three elderly residents.
A man in his 70s and a woman in her 60s were taken to the Dandenong Hospital suffering smoke inhalation.
The woman’s body was found in the house.
The house had been without power since heavy storms on Wednesday, and the occupants had been using candles and generators to power the house.
Manks Road resident Wayne Sharp said he had no doubt that the power outage contributed to the deadly blaze.
“We had the CFA out here on Wednesday night to remove a tree that had fallen across a power line,” he said.
“They had the power turned off within half an hour, but for some reason it took three days to turn it back on.”
Mr Sharp said most residents on Manks Road had made numerous calls to local power company SP AusNet before the fatal fire.
“We kept getting told different things, that it was going to be fixed Friday morning, then it was too late and the earliest would be Saturday.”
“If power had been restored the incident across the road probably would not have happened,” he said.
“The power outage directly contributed to the fire.”
A spokesperson for SP AusNet said up to 125,000 homes in the south-east had lost power during the storm.
“Most properties had their power restored by Saturday, and individual faults were rectified and reconnected on Sunday,” she said.
“Every property in the Cranbourne and Clyde area has been reconnected.”
Police are preparing a report for the coroner.