No one was injured but at least two people were left homeless early this morning after a fire heavily damaged their home on Glacier Trail at Porter Beach.

Porter Fire Chief Lewis Craig called the blaze his “worst nightmare, a fire down on the beach,” in possibly the most inaccessible neighborhood in the entire Town of Porter.

Craig told the Chesterton Tribune today that the PFD was dispatched at 1:47 a.m. and that when he arrived, the first on the scene, flames were already shooting through the front door of the two-story residence at 3015 Glacier Trail. Craig noted that the home is on the beach itself and accessed by a staircase leading up to the roadway, which dead-ends at that point. Although lighter vehicles--like an ambulance and rescue truck--were able to reach the home from the beach, the engines could not and firefighters were accordingly forced to attack the blaze from the staircase.

In addition to the PFD, the Chesterton, Burns Harbor, Liberty Township, Beverly Shores, and Portage fire departments all responded. Their one piece of luck, Craig said: a fire hydrant at the corner of Bote Drive and Glacier Trail, to which Beverly Shores firefighters connected a line to a CFD pumper. From the pumper a three-inch hose was run to the staircase and then split in a Y-link to a pair of 100-foot 1.75-inch hoses, which firefighters ran to the house below.

The PFD did not ultimately clear the scene until 5:51 a.m.

Craig estimated damage to the structure at $85,000 and said that it was home to two different renters, one in an apartment above and one below. Neither the occupants of the residence nor firefighters were injured in the blaze, Craig added, although a parakeet is reported to have died.

The fire itself appears to have originated in a rear utility room in the downstairs apartment, and while the Porter County Fire Investigation Strike Team has not completed its investigation--complicated by the fact that the roof of the residence collapsed into the utility room--Craig believes preliminarily that the fire was electrical in origin.

The downstairs renter, Craig said, had been running two space heaters off a single circuit and at some point last night one of the renter’s lights went out, leading him to check the fuse box. That fuse box he found on fire, which evidently spread rapidly.

This morning Craig planned to return to the scene to check for hotspots.