Flames leveled a two-story paddlewheeler Thursday on the Muskingum River.
Several local fire departments responded to the blaze but were unable to save the boat, where a Blue Rock couple live during the summer months.
Tom Howard, one of the boat's owners, told a Devola volunteer firefighter the fire was probably electrical in nature.
"I heard sparks and then the lights dimmed," he said.
Howard said he went to the breaker box and saw smoke; then he and his wife, Gwen Yearego, evacuated.
When asked what was on the boat, Howard said, "Everything but what you see," referring to the clothes he was wearing.
Yearego stood on the banks watching firefighters battle the blaze and was consoled by some of her friends.
"We live on the boat during the summer," she said. "Everything we own was on that boat."
Local fire departments initially had problems putting the fire out because the boat detached from the dock where it was moored and began floating down the river.
"It was tied when we started to attack it with the fire hoses," said Richard Best, the assistant chief of the Devola Volunteer Fire Company. "Once it came loose, it floated 30 to 40 feet from the bank. We tried to latch onto it, but once it got out so far it was hard to catch it."
The boat eventually lodged against a tree on the shore of the Muskingum, and firefighters on the scene reported the blaze was under control by 12:30 p.m.
The superstructure of the boat was almost completely destroyed, leaving only the wooden framework.
The Marietta Fire Department sent its fire boat to the scene, but because of an air leak, it was unable to pump water to battle the blaze.
"The pump and the motor were fine," Marietta Fire Chief Tom Dempsey said. "(The boat) has to draft water out of the river; there is no reservoir tank. You can have as many leaks as you want on the outbound side of the water, but the inbound side has to be tight. You cannot have any air at all leak into the system or it won't pump."
Dempsey said this has happened twice before, both times on training runs. After those incidents, firefighters put sealant on the pipes, but Dempsey said the vibrations created when it tried to pump on Thursday were enough to create a leak.
He said firefighters were going to take the area in question completely apart and put on a bolted flange which would seal the area completely tight.
Howard and Yearego were not injured, but Best and two employees of Marietta Ambulance who work for the Devola squad were taken to Selby General Hospital. One of the ambulance employees reported chest pains and remained at the hospital as a precautionary measure.
Also responding to the fire were members of the Oak Grove, Salem, Fearing and L-A departments.
