Fire heavily damages house under construction on Bagdad Road, Allegheny Township

Fire caused extensive damage to a house under construction in Allegheny Township on Sunday afternoon.

The fire at 1241 Bagdad Road was reported shortly after 1 p.m., a Westmoreland County emergency dispatcher said. Volunteer firefighters from seven or eight departments from the Alle-Kiski Valley responded.

No one was in the house at the time and no one was hurt, fire Chief Mike Nickels said. Firefighters got it under control in about a half-hour, he said.

A state police fire marshal and Allegheny Township police were investigating the cause, Nickels said.

When they arrived, Nickels said firefighters found heavy fire on the first floor of the house, which he said was about three-fourths completed.

The stairway to the second floor had been burned away; firefighters accessed the second floor by climbing ladders to a window at an end of the house above a three-bay garage.

Nick and Bryanna Balestra live a few houses down. They saw smoke coming from the house when they went outside to smoke after finishing lunch.

“It smelled like burning plastic real bad,” she said.

“We didn’t know if someone was burning brush or what,” he said.

The Balestras and another neighbor said the house has been under construction for at least a few years. Bryanna Balestra said nobody was living in it yet.

“They work on it every week, though,” Nick Balestra said.

Nick Balestra said he went to the house and knocked on doors to make sure nobody was inside. When he did, he looked through a window next to the front door and saw the inside was engulfed.

With his skills as a plumber, Nick Balestra said he turned off natural gas to the house at the meter. The couple watched from near the bottom of the muddy driveway up to the house as firefighters worked.

“They did their job real quick,” he said.

At the scene, Nickels said officials did not yet know who owns the property.

Because the house was unfinished and unoccupied, Nickels said there were not a lot of contents inside, which he said made fighting the fire easier.

There are no hydrants in the immediate area of the house. For water, Nickels said firefighters relied on tanker trucks, some of which filled at hydrants along Route 356.