By Kathryn Skelton,Staff Writer

TURNER – Fire destroyed a California couple’s vacant summer place on Little Wilson Pond on Friday. Black smoke was so thick a neighbor two houses away thought her own house was on fire.

An alarm call, triggered by security sensors, came from the house at 24 Little Wilson Pond Road at 11:29 a.m., according to the Androscoggin County Sheriff’s Office.

First on the scene, Turner Deputy Fire Chief Win Coleman said he and another firefighter were met in the driveway by a caretaker with a key.

“We unlocked it, opened the door. It was so much heat, as soon as it got air, whoosh, it was coming right after us,” Coleman said.

It took several hours to control the smoke and flames. Neighbors identified the owner as Tom Peters, a retiree who lives in California.

Turner fire Chief Steve Fish said the home was destroyed. He and his crew investigated the source of the blaze once the fire was out.

“We’re looking pretty hard at an electrical cause,” Fish said.

The home, built on a grade, looked one-story tall from the road and three-stories tall from the water. Jason Van Buren, who lives down the road, said he mowed the lawn for the Peters family in the summer. They left the home furnished when they closed up.

Diane Moody said she was on the phone just before noon when she interrupted her daughter to say, “Hon, I got to go, I smell smoke.’ I was racing around my house, thinking I’d left something unattended. I was ready to run out there barefoot, I didn’t care.”

Once she saw it wasn’t her own house, she ran next door, surprised to find it wasn’t on fire either. “You couldn’t even see them trees,” Moody said, pointing to the ring of woods around the Peters’ home. “It was just huge black smoke.”

Coleman said it was too early to determine the cause of the fire. Several local towns responded, and there were no reports of firefighter injury.

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