Every day at 11:45 a.m., Monae Mazzeo, 35, of Secaucus made her way home to 34 Gail Place to have her lunch. Working at Panasonic on Meadowlands Parkway less than a mile away allowed her to check on the house and have her lunch. But on Feb. 23, she found her street blocked with fire trucks. The members of the Seventh Street fire house sprayed hoses down from a 95 foot high firefighting platform, as other companies from the rest of the town battled a blaze from the ground, billows of smoke making it unclear to onlookers from a block away which house was on fire.
The arches of water pushed back the flames and created a dramatic scene of smoke and stream for nearly two and half hours. To Mazzeo’s horror, the house – gutted by flames and a gas explosion that had set the blaze – was hers.
Since the house was empty except for the landlord’s German shepherd, Mazzeo soon realized how lucky she was, and how lucky the neighborhood was.
“Had I come home 15 minutes earlier, I would have been inside that house,” she said, standing on the sidewalk with the rest of the crowd, staring down the block as the arches of hoses struggled to make the site safe.
Remarkably, this was the only house on the block empty at the time of explosion, as most of the other houses had kids in them due to the school holiday.
Later, Mazzeo would think of the wedding dress she’d stored in the back room for her big day next September, the piles printed invitations and the party favors all smoldering ashes in a house that the town would have to demolish within a day.
All she and her fianc