Mo. Fire Caused by Potting Soil, Cigar

INDEPENDENCE, Mo. --

It was the first day of spring. Shannon Simmermon had gone out on the back deck for a final smoke before bed.

"So when I finished my cigar, I stuck it in a pot of soil setting up against the house," he told KMBC's Donna Pitman. "Didn't think a thing about it. It was dirt. So I stuck it in there and went to bed."

Except potting soil isn't just dirt. It's a mixture of fertilizer and peat moss. Those are two things you'd never want to set on fire, said Independence Fire Department Chief Inspector Gene Gould.

Simmermon and Gina Kephart headed to bed, only to wake up at 3 a.m. to a living nightmare.

"I looked above the curtains and it was glowing orange," Kephart said. "I could hear a roaring nose. I pulled back the curtain and I could see the fire."

They scrambled out their home with just their robes. Nothing else made it.

They were shocked, stunned and heart-broken when they learned Simmermon's simple act of extinguishing a cigar had burned down their dream home.

"We had no idea that there were additives in potting soil that would be flammable. Dirt is dirt!" Kephart exclaimed.

But Gould said there is a huge difference.

"It is a highly combustible environment to extinguish a common ignition source, such as a cigarette or cigar," he said.

Fertilizer was also used by Timothy McVeigh to bring down the Murrah building in Oklahoma City, Okla.

Gould said he sees potting soil fires a handful of times each year in Independence. A fire department in Colorado started a campaign called, "Keep your butt out of the pot!"

Simmermon and Kephart are beginning to rebuild from the March fire and said they hope the repairs are complete in March.

They just want others to learn from their costly mistake.

"It's unbelievable. It's the most heart-breaking thing that anybody can experience," Simmermon said.

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