A COUPLE watched as their £500,000 Hampshire home was reduced to charred ruin.

The roof of the four-bedroom detached house in Barton-on-Sea collapsed after fire ripped through the property yesterday.

Owner Alan Stopher was gardening when a neighbour alerted him to the blaze.

The 69-year-old a retired environmental health officer said: “I went upstairs, poked the door open and whoosh!

“Thick black smoke came out across my head and singed my hair. I didn’t waste any time getting out.”

Hampshire Fire and Rescue Service was called at 11.30am and had four fire engines, two specialist vehicles and 35 firefighters and support staff at the height of the blaze.

But they were seriously hampered by a collapsed high voltage power cable that was stopping them getting to one side of the house in Dilly Lane.

The fire engines also had to ferry water to the scene because the pressure was too low to support more than one or two pumps.

Dan Tasker, the incident commander, said: “It is a burned out shell and we simply don’t know what caused it.

“A fire investigator will work with a structural engineer to try and see why it spread so quickly.”

Mr Stopher, a guard on Swanage steam railway, said he believed the fire started in the study.

His wife Suzanne, 55, a registrar, had been at work.