CLEVELAND, Ohio — Cleveland firefighters responded to a house fire Friday night that left the structure completely destroyed.
Officials tell 3News a vacant home in the 12300 block of Phillips Avenue in the Forest Hills neighborhood went up in flames around 5 p.m. Investigators do not yet know what caused the blaze, but no one was injured.
"We just saw smoke and then customers started coming in saying the house is on fire, we thought they were just joking," Joseph Allan said.
Allan's family owns the USA Food Mart next door, and he took video of the home completely engulfed in flames. He told WKYC it had been abandoned for about 10 years.
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Officials said the wind added an extra challenge for the roughly 30 firefighters that fought the flames. Luckily, they said lots on either side of the house were empty and the fire didn't spread.
"When we thought it was going towards the grass, that's when we thought it was going to hit [our] building," Allan admitted. "Thank God it didn't."
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