Rachael Ray has shared never-before-seen footage of her upstate New York home after it was gutted by a fire in August.
The celebrity cook shared a brief clip to her social media as she showed what was left of her bedroom, bathroom and closet area.
In the shocking scenes, the bedroom is seen without a roof and any hint of interior furnishings have been charred beyond recognition.
‘This was our bedroom… and our library… and that was our bathroom and our dressing area.’ the 52-year-old TV host is heard saying as she tours the debris strewn property in the video clip.
Devastation: Rachael Ray shared a clip showing the damage to her property in upstate New York on Sunday after a fire ripped through it on August 9
Traumatic event: Ray posted the clip on Sunday ahead of the new episode of the Rachael Ray Show airing on Monday when she will give a full tour of the damaged property
Ray posted it on Sunday ahead of the new episode of the Rachael Ray Show airing on Monday when she will give a full tour of the damaged property.
‘When one chapter ends, a new one begins’ Ray captioned a set of photos of the burned out building on Instagram.
The fire damaged the roof and second floor of Ray’s mansion, which is located around 50 miles north of Albany.
Ray is set to tell her story on the season 15 premiere of her talk show on Monday, recounting how she and husband John Cusimano heard a man screaming in their backyard, telling them their roof was on fire.
The blaze reportedly started accidentally in the chimney fire, state officials announced at the end of August.
The celebrity chef told RachaelRayShow.com: ‘Our fire started in the chimney,’
Scorched: The 52-year-old TV chef showed what remained of her bedroom and library
The fire damaged the roof and second floor of Ray’s home, which is located around 50 miles north of Albany
Gone: She also showed the bathroom and closet area
‘It was creosote that spit out the top and landed on the roof,’ the star said while explaining that their house is less than 15 years old and they had their fireplace cleaned twice a year.
She revealed it was a neighbor who alerted the couple to the blaze.
‘A person was going through our backyard on an ATV and was kind enough to come down the hill and say, “Your roof’s on fire.” Literally screaming it in our backyard,’ she continued. ‘We went outside [and] sure enough, that was the case.’
Rachael said she didn’t have much time to grab some belongings and their dog and get out of the house before the fire tore through it.
Accident: Rachael was home when the fire began. A neighbor alerted her and husband John to a fire on the roof and they didn’t have much time to gather a few belongings and get out
Stat officials announced at the end of August that the fire started in the chimney. Rachael explained ‘It was creosote that spit out the top and landed on the roof,’
Sharing: Ray will be talking about the fire in the season 15 premiere of her talk show on Monday
Exclusive drone footage shows how almost the entire structure of Rachael Ray’s upstate New York mansion almost burned to the ground after a fire ripped through the building on Sunday
‘Immediately I ran upstairs to get medicines, photographs, notebooks — precious things. I heard the fire in the walls,’ she recalled. ‘It was blood-curdling and chilling from head to toe. I turn to leave and there was a first responder right in front of me, [saying], “Get out, get out now. You have to go.”‘
‘I went to get the dog, and that was it,’ she says. ‘We left our house.’
While much of the building remains standing, a massive proportion of the mansion went up in flames with most of the roof completely destroyed.
Most of the damage was to the second floor of the home and the roof. Ceilings caved in and water damage occurred after firefighters tackled the blaze but much of the first floor is still intact.
Initially the couple thought that their state-of-the-art kitchen – where Rachael has been doing a lot of filming for her show – had survived the blaze, but unfortunately it is not the case.
‘No, the outer walls are standing,’ she explained, ‘but they have to bulldoze the whole thing. I thought that my pizza oven had survived, [but then weeks later] something fell and broke the pizza oven, too.’
Initially the couple thought that their state-of-the-art kitchen – where Rachael has been doing a lot of filming for her show – had survived the blaze, but unfortunately it is not the case
The following day the celebrity cook tweeted, ‘Thank you to our local first responders for being kind and gracious and saving what they could of our home. Grateful that my mom, my husband, my dog… we’re all okay. These are the days we all have to be grateful for what we have, not what we’ve lost.’
She added that she lost her cell phone in the blaze and sent the tweet from a team member and could not respond to calls and texts wishing her well.
DailyMail.com learned from fire chiefs that the house had no fire sprinklers that could have stopped the raging inferno, and the house inside New York State’s Adirondack Park is in such a remote area that there were no fire hydrants for miles.
Ray tweeted her thanks to the firefighters who battled to save her home for several hours
The home is pictured on Google Earth before being struck by fire on August 9
The blaze raged for several hours while firefighters from several departments tackled the fire
Ray was at her home in Lake Luzerne, New York, where she had been spending quarantine with husband John M Cusimano, 52, and their dog, when the fire broke out Sunday night
Some 70 volunteer firefighters from 14 different departments were called in when the fierce blaze broke out in the house’s roof on Sunday afternoon. They took nearly two hours to get the flames under control
‘The big problem was getting water to the scene,’ LaFlure said. ‘We are a rural area, there are no fire hydrants and that’s the way it is. You can only bring the water in with trucks, 1,500 or 2,000 gallons at a time and you can go through that very quickly.’
The firefighters soon sucked a pond on Ray’s road dry, he added, before then starting pumping from a lake.
‘And there was no sprinkler system which is something that down the road we would like people to deal with,’ said LaFlure.
Fire crews were on site well past 11pm having been on scene for several hours tackling the fire. Ray, her husband, and mother were at home at the time and managed to escape the fire along with their dog, Bella, who also escaped alive from the blaze
Ray spoke out on Monday for the first time since the fire, thanking first responders and confirming that she and her family are safe
‘The fire is more on the roof level,’ said LaFlure. ‘Fires don’t burn down very easily, they burn up, so there was substantial damage on the second floor but other than water damage and some ceilings that came down the first floor is in really good shape.’
LaFlure said the fire would have been much worse if it had broken out later in the day when the couple were asleep, but it was spotted before it took too much hold.
Ray said her mother Elsa Scuderi was also able to escape from the burning home unharmed
‘It could have been substantially worse. They were very fortunate. We tried to come as fast as we could, but it doesn’t come quickly. If you are down in a smaller urban area, the next fire department may be five or six minutes away, here you are talking 15 minutes away at least.’
Luzerne-Hadley Fire Chief Ted Backus, who was first on the scene, could see flames leaping through the roof as soon as he arrived.
He immediately called for mutual aid from other volunteer fire departments from miles around.
The cause of the blaze is not known, but it is not thought to be suspicious.
Investigators from New York State’s office of fire prevention and control were still on site on Monday morning combing through the rubble of Ray’s home, which lies deep in the woods a quarter of a mile up a dirt road.
He said he could not put a figure on the loss. ‘All I know is that it is a beautiful piece of land and property up there.’
The home is located in upstate New York, about half an hour’s drive north of Saratoga Springs
One neighbor said the blaze was so fierce the walls of Ray’s home glowed bright orange.
‘It was like the fire was coming through the walls,’ said who declined to give her name. ‘I ran outside and thought: This is bad.
‘It just went up so fast, it’s amazing they all managed to get out unhurt.’
Ray has lived in the southern Adirondacks for years. Her mother at one stage ran a Howard Johnson Inn in neighboring Lake George, and she ran the pub at the luxury Sagamore Hotel before finding fame as a TV cook. She owns almost 200 acres of land around Lake Luzerne.
She has been filming and cooking up a storm from her home since the coronavirus pandemic began and in April posted video online of her kitchen, in which she revealed that she designed it herself by drawing it out on a piece of paper.
The fire quickly took hold in the upstate New York home that was mainly built out of wood
‘I decorated the house before it was ever built,’ Ray says in a video tour of her kitchen and pantry. ‘I drew the house on a piece of paper so I knew what I wanted it to be in my mind.’
The spacious, open-plan design allowed Ray to film her show from the comfort of her own kitchen.
In a video clip that gave a tour of the kitchen, she revealed that her two favorite appliances was the six-burner gas stove and her wood-fired pizza oven.