President Joe Biden retold a story during the White House “Summit on Fire Prevention and Control” about a blaze at his Delaware home that has been criticized for being exaggerated.
During the event, Biden praised firefighters for saving his two sons after a 1972 car crash, which killed his first wife and their daughter, as well as for rushing him to the hospital in 1988 when he was suffering from two aneurysms. But he also repeated a story about a 2004 blaze at his Wilmington, Delaware, property.
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“I was doing Meet the Press, and lightning struck a little pond behind my house,” Biden told the conference Tuesday. “It came up through the ground into an air conditioning system.”
“From the basement to the third floor, the attic, everything was ruined,” he added. “We almost lost a couple firefighters, they tell me, because the kitchen floor was burning between beams, and then the house, in addition, almost collapsed into the basement.”
An Associated Press report at the time described a “small” fire that was contained to the then-senator’s kitchen, though it did mention “heavy smoke.”
“Luckily, we got it pretty early,” Cranston Heights Fire Company Chief George Lamborn told the outlet. “The fire was under control in 20 minutes.”
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Biden, who has a penchant for stretching the truth when telling stories, has similarly been scrutinized for claiming to have paid his respects at the Tree of Life synagogue after the shooting deaths of 11 people when he had not, among other examples.
