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Tuggeranong residents have described the terrifying moment they woke to find a ute engulfed with flames rolling through their neighbourhood on Saturday night, saying it was pure luck that no one was killed. As police continued to investigate what caused the vehicle to catch alight and crash through an elderly woman's bedroom window, neighbour Heike Kaiser said she had been woken by a dull boom. "I thought it was a car misfiring. Then there was a second one, a third one and I saw flames at the back of the wall," Ms Kaiser said. The ute packed with jerry cans caught alight while parked on Jim Pike Avenue in Gordon and was soon engulfed with flames up to five metres high, according to police reports. The extreme heat of the fire caused the handbrake to malfunction, causing the burning vehicle to roll more than 100 metres down the road and smash into the single-storey unit on Knoke Avenue. Fortunately the occupant was not home and no one else was injured. "The utility hit the sign on the roundabout and went straight through her bedroom window," Ms Kaiser said. Ms Kaiser and her neighbours were evacuated, at which point she saw the flames reach "double the height of the wall". She said the woman's security system prevented firefighters from accessing the burning bedroom so they had to extract tiles from the roof and enter the house via the manhole. "Her bed was longways down the window, it must have set the whole bed on fire. I heard a fireman calling 'the doona is on fire'," she said. Ms Kaiser said had the woman been in bed, she would have been killed. "I said thank God she isn't at home. Imagine what would have happened if she went to bed early like me. God knows what would have happened otherwise," Ms Kaiser said. Footage taken from a police car camera shows the flames building, before the burning ute begins its journey, leaving a large fire behind. A police officer runs out the way, and then another begins to chase it as it heads for the units. A statement from ACT Policing said the fire had been deemed non-suspicious.

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