BOSTON (AP) – Fourteen people, including several children, were injured Monday when a blaze broke out on the first floor of a triple-decker home and quickly spread throughout the building.
Firefighters rescued screaming children over ladders from the upper floor of the building in Boston’s Mattapan neighborhood, Boston Fire spokesman Steve MacDonald said.
Other victims jumped or fell from second- and third-floor balconies in a desperate effort to escape from the flames, Boston Emergency Medical Services chief Richard Serino said.
An electrical short circuit in a first-floor living room sparked the fast-moving blaze, MacDonald said.
Eight adults and six children were taken to the hospital for treatment, Serino said, adding that witnesses who refused to be mere bystanders played a key role in rescue efforts before police and fire fighters arrived.
Serino said two of those injured were in serious condition, including a 2-year-old boy whose limp body was found by a firefighter groping his way through the smoke. Paramedics resuscitated the child before he was taken to hospital, he said.
“I was crawling on the floor, I couldn’t see anything. I opened a couple of doors and I heard a faint cry and just feeling around there and heard a baby on the bed,” firefighter Renard Miller told reporters at the scene. “So I felt around the bed and found the baby. I took my mask off and put it on the baby’s face.”
Rosamund Bloom, a neighbor, said she saw the flames start in the first floor, then race up the building and through the roof.
“There was this young man who was driving down the avenue and he’d seen the smoke, so he pulled over and went inside and he rescued one adult and two children,” Bloom said in a telephone interview. “And he was doing that, a woman who lived on the third floor, she jumped from the balcony.”
Other victims suffered non-life threatening injuries, including smoke inhalation, burns and possible fractures together with head, neck and back injuries after jumping or falling from the building’s upper stories, Serino said.
The injured include a fire fighter who suffered burns to the neck and a Boston Police Sergeant who had to be treated for smoke inhalation, Serino said.
“It was a very busy afternoon, but the fact that people on the scene helped out before the police, fire or EMS got there … helped to save lives,” he said.
Boston Firefighters Union President Edward Kelley said the fire alarm box on the street corner was activated by a pedestrian 41 seconds before the first cell phone call came in.
The fire destroyed the house and caused about $500,000 in damage.
AP-ES-11-12-07 1744EST
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