Ammo goes off as blaze burns house

The Mount Carmel Band of Lowellville has lost decades’ worth of sheet music.

POLAND — No one was hurt Friday morning as fire destroyed a house at 1657 Coit Road, but that’s the only consolation for Lauren Susany, who lived there with her family.

“It’s gone — it’s gone. There’s nothing,” she said into her cell phone, answering yet another call from concerned friends and family members as she sat in a neighbor’s yard after the 11 a.m. blaze.

The fire, she said, appears to have started in the garage at the four-bedroom home she shared with her mother and stepfather, Karen and Pat Naples, and a brother and sister.

Her sister, Jamie Naples, 18, was the only one home at the time. She heard something in the garage, and then smoke began to fill the house, Susany said.

Jamie Naples ran to a neighbor’s and called 911.

Several fire departments responded, including the Western Reserve Joint Fire District and Campbell, Coitsville, Springfield and Lowellville departments.

Fire and rescue vehicles clogged Coit Road as Lowellville firefighter Bill Ruess directed traffic away.

“Do you hear that?” he said. The fire was sending out a continuous barrage of popping sounds similar to firecrackers.

It was ammunition. Pat Naples is a hunter, Susany explained.

That ammunition posed a danger for firefighters.

“We won’t go in a house if there’s ammunition,” Ruess said, unless someone needs to be rescued. By then, firefighters were reasonably sure the house was empty. The house was valued at $213,600, according to the Mahoning County auditor’s office.

Susany, 24, was in Lowellville at the high school assisting with marching-band practice when she got the call about the fire.

She dropped everything and rushed home, worried that her sister didn’t make it out.

Her father, Dave Susany of Struthers, also rushed to the house once he realized it was his daughter’s.

Driving on U.S. Route 224 on his way home from shopping, he had seen the smoke — a narrow plume at first. He went home, he said, then out of curiosity as the smoke got heavier, he drove toward it.

When he realized whose house it was, he told firefighters. They let him near the scene.

He comforted his daughter as she sat in the yard across the road, assuring her that everything would be fine.

Susany, grateful that everyone was OK, still mourned the loss of “so many sentimental things” that can never be replaced.

Gone is 80 years’ worth of sheet music belonging to the Lowellville- Mount Carmel Community Band, said Susany, who kept the band’s music.

“Gone — I don’t even know how many songs,” she said.

She said the band would have to cancel its appearance tonight at St. Lucy Church in Campbell. There were too many younger members in the 25- to 30-member band, she said, who would not know the music by heart.

Susany also worried about the loss of PowerPoint presentations, textbooks and other tools she needed for lessons at Boardman Glenwood Middle School, where she’ll be a first-year teacher this fall in seventh- and eighth-grade science classes.

People would understand, her father assured her, adding that the music could be re-created from recordings the band made through the years. Susany had only the clothes she was wearing plus a trumpet and her purse, which she’d left at marching-band practice.

She said she believes the family will be fine. Relatives will step in to help.

The cause of the fire is not yet known. Sonny Chinowth, retired chief of the Western Reserve district who was at work at the fire scene, said the state fire marshal’s office has been called into the investigation.

starmack@vindy.com