Manorville fire victims reflect on the events of the day that changed their lives forever

There are five words that come to Manorville resident George Moretti’s mind when he tries to describe the fire that stole his home last year: a freight train from hell.

“You hear people from the midwest talk about tornadoes and they say it sounds like a freight train,” Moretti said of last April’s wildfires, which took George and Kathleen’s family home, along with more than 1,100 acres of Pine Barrens forest.

“This sounded like a freight train from hell.”

When recalling the day of the wildfire, Moretti said he and his wife waited as long as they could before the mandatory evacuation of his Manorville neighborhood ultimately forced the couple to abandon their house.

“Nobody wants to leave their home,” he said. “We hung out as long as we could and then realized we would be putting other people in danger if we stayed.”

The most frightening part of the experience came after the couple was already displaced and waiting at a shopping center, unable to decipher the truth out of conflicting reports coming in that described how much destruction the wildfire had left behind.

“I had some people saying my garage was on fire, but the firemen were there and they might get a handle on it and then I would get a call from another friend of saying, ‘Your house is gone.’ I didn’t know what to believe,” he said.

The two were eventually allowed to return to their property in Kathleen’s vehicle, which George said they’d jam-packed with irreplaceable family photos and documents.

Upon return, the two learned their garage had been completely destroyed, as stored belongings aided in lighting up the structure like a “tinderbox,” according to Moretti, who added quick action by responding firefighters helped to stop a basement fire at its source, saving the house’s skeleton.

“They were able to get the hoses into the basement windows and into fire as it started so they got a handle on it really quick,” Moretti said. “It was the heat and smoke damage that really destroyed everything. The copper pipes melted and the main wood floors all buckled. It was nasty. The worst part was sitting there at two o’clock in the morning calling our insurance company and saying, ‘What do we do?'””

One year later, the Morettis are living in a trailer on the property as they patiently wait for construction to finish on a new, and more energy efficient, version of their family home of 25 years.

“On Easter Sunday we’d had 17 people at our house for Easter dinner, including my son-in-law, and by Monday we were living at his house in Riverhead,” he said of the fire’s impact. “We stayed with them for a month until our insurance company put a trailer on our property and that’s where we’ve been ever since.”

The couple say they will be able to resume life within the walls of their home next month, when construction will begin to wind down.

But that’s not what makes George and Kathleen most thankful when they think about last April.

“We were lucky,’ Moretti said. “We were lucky because nobody got hurt.”

In fact, it is not the replacement of their home that brought the most joy to the couple over the past 12 months, but rather the delayed re-appearance of their cat, Cocktail.

“He found his way back home after three weeks, which is kind of a miracle,” Moretti said of the reappearance of his adopted cat with the crooked tail. “He was burned. All of his hair was burned. His whiskers were burned and all of the pads on his paws were all burnt up, so he spent a month at the Manorville vet.”

Kitty, another cat, was not so lucky.

“We couldn’t find that cat on a good day if he didn’t want us to find him, let alone that day,” Moretti said of his pet, who died in the inferno. “So, we lost Kitty.”

He believes a lack of water was the most critical complication for firefighters who responded last April, which included representation from every department in Suffolk County.

“If they had fire hydrants on the street, I think they would have been able to save my house,” he said. “A silver lining to all this is that we’re now getting wells in the area. If you remember, another wildfire broke out in Manorville a week later where they had fire hydrants. That made a huge difference.”

RiverheadLOCAL file photos by Peter Blasl

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