On Friday, May 13th, General Hospital (GH) star Kelly Monaco woke up to discover that the front yard of her Los Angeles home was on fire.
In footage shared exclusively with TMZ, Monaco documented the blaze, which soon engulfed portions of her Sherman Oaks area home.
“This is how it started,” she commented in one video clip, which showed the yard being quickly consumed by flames. “Isn’t this crazy?”
The footage shows emergency personnel and roadside vehicles surrounded by a pervasive smoke. At one point, the model-turned-actress – who has portrayed Sam McCall on GH for nearly twenty years – turned the camera toward herself and exclaimed, “My house is on fire.”
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The massive blaze is estimated to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages. Luckily, Monaco escaped the situation unscathed.
ET Canada reports that arson investigators have since looked over the property’s video surveillance and determined that the fire was not set intentionally.
The culprit, as it turns out, was a cigarette butt that someone had thrown upon the empty lot next to the actress’s property.
“Something as little as a cigarette butt can cause casualties and devastation,” Monaco shared with TMZ.
It’s a scary lesson that the actress wasn’t expecting to learn – particularly on Friday the 13th!
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