Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Before you head out the door, we want to catch you up with what happened while you were sleeping.

There was a lot of emergency traffic in south Wichita just after midnight as firefighters headed to a house fire. That fire was reported at 12:10 am at a home near Skinner and Pattie, in a neighborhood just northwest of Mt. Vernon and Southeast Boulevard.

When firefighters arrived, they found heavy fire in the back of the house. Crews had to back out of the home and fight the fire from the outside briefly because the heat was so intense. They brought the fire under control quickly, but not before it caused some pretty significant damage.

Wichita Fire Department Battalion Chief Ernie Schuler said nobody was inside the house and there were no injuries. The cause of the fire and a damage estimate have not yet been determined.

Also overnight, several viewers posted questions on the KAKE Facebook page about the electricity being out near Central and I-235. There hasn't been any word from Westar Energy about what caused the outage, but by 5 a.m. Wednesday, the utility was not reporting any outages anywhere in the state.