A domestic fire that destroyed a home in Nevada County on Friday night may have been started by a meteor that streaked through the sky of Northern California, according to firemen. Around 7:30 p.m., locals reported seeing a bright light rip across the night sky, and a fire crew responded to reports of a structure fire on a cow ranch at the same time, according to Penn Valley Fire District Capt. Clayton Thomas.
No one was hurt, but Tug, a family’s dog, and many bunnies perished, according to the fire department. According to Thomas, there was also a video of someone who noticed the light and drove to the location where they believed it had fallen and stopped in front of the fire. They believed that to be roughly where they had observed the light fall.
Firefighters fought the incident for almost an hour and a half. People in the public approached the on-scene firefighters to express their belief that the fire was related to the meteor shower. Many locals recorded the fireball in the sky and shared it on social media.
In an interview with KCRA, resident Dustin Procita said, “I heard a tremendous bang, I started to smell smoke, and I stepped onto my porch and it was entirely engulfed in flames.” They claimed it to be a meteor. Thomas stated that although the department is looking into whether the meteor contributed to the incident, no formal conclusions are anticipated for several weeks. The majority of the 1,500 meteors that strike Earth each year, according to him, land in remote places.
He remarked, “It’s very, very rare, but not impossible [to hit a structure],” adding that in his 25 years as a firefighter, he had never worked a meteor fire. Around the time of the fire, NASA also noted a meteor shower above California. Sacramento’s northeastern border is Penn Valley.
The American Meteor Society noted on its website that there have been multiple reports of a fireball observed last night at 7:28 PM throughout the Pacific states. According to NASA, the fireball was moving at about 32,000 mph. The meteor that was seen above California this week, according to NASA, was not a component of the Taurid meteor shower, which was also observed in California this week.