A fire damaged a California apartment building Sunday when a man tried to exterminate a spider by setting it on fire with a torch lighter.
A do-it-yourself extermination gone off the rails Sunday ended up ousting residents from a California apartment.
A man set fire to a spider in the Redding apartment with a torch lighter, reported The Record Searchlight.
“It was a huge wolf spider,” Lyndsey Wisegarver, a caregiver for one of the tenants, told the publication. The flaming arachnid scuttled onto a mattress in an upstairs bedroom, setting it abalze as well, she said. The tenants extinguished that fire, but by then it had spread to a flag collection and window curtains.
By the time firefighters arrived around noon, the blaze had spread to a closet as well. Firefighters ended up extinguishing the blaze, which caused about $11,000 in damage and rendered the townhouse uninhabitable, Battlion Chief Rob Pitt told KRCR. There were no injuries, except to the spider.
Other amateur bug-killing efforts have gone awry recently.
In December, a woman tried to kill bedbugs in her Cincinnati home with alcohol that ignited near an open flame, causing $250,000 in damage and displacing 10 people. And in November, a similar effort by a 13-year-old boy, also in Ohio, sparked a $300,000 blaze that left eight people without homes.
