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1.26.2001 08:23
Fire forces evacuation
of elderly from manor
By RICHARD C. DUJARDIN
Journal
Staff Writer
EAST PROVIDENCE
-- Nearly 150 mostly elderly or disabled residents in the city's nine-story City View Manor were forced to flee to a connecting building last night after a fire in a fifth-floor apartment sent thick smoke billowing into the corridor.
While no one was directly injured by the fire, one man was taken away by rescue after complaining of chest pains.
The blaze -- which investigators believe started in the kitchen area of apartment 511 belonging to Rose Golden -- set off the building's smoke alarms just a few minutes after 5 p.m.
Two doors down from the fire, in apartment 515, Jim McAuley was visiting his mother Mary Lee, 76, when both heard the alarm sound.
Looking out into the hallway, McAuley saw the door on Golden's apartment ajar, smoke seeping out. McAuley says he was concerned someone needed help. "I called out but heard nothing. Then I opened the door some more and saw flames and black sooty smoke."
As McAuley closed the door and beat a hasty retreat, his mother called 911. It was 5:05 p.m. Within a minute, the two say, the first of many fire trucks arrived and, moments afterward, residents heard men banging on their doors telling them to clear out.
Capt. Stephen Camille, the battalion chief, said firefighters pinpointed the source of the fire quickly and extinguished it by 5:15 p.m., but not before billows of smoke had filled the fifth-floor corridor.
The building complex, located two blocks north of Route 44 at 99 Goldsmith Ave., has 245 residents -- 150 in the wing known as City View and 95 others in an adjacent connected building known as Goldsmith Manor. While both buildings have smoke alarms, neither has sprinklers.
Although Camille says he gave no orders to evacuate any of the floors other than the fifth and sixth, other apartment residents say they got orders from firefighters to leave their apartments quickly.
"I was sitting relaxing, watching TV, when a man came and said, 'Get out, get out,' " said ninth-floor resident Gina deMatos, 85. "I started to shake and shake, and said to myself, 'I better get my coat.' I didn't even have time to get my pills."
A resident of the apartment complex for 27 years, deMatos was sure, however, not to leave behind a basket that was already packed with pictures and other reminders of her life with her husband, Agostinho, who died 11 years ago.
On another floor, Janet Champagne's 91-year-old mother heard the buzzing alarm and, believing it was from something in her apartment that she had turned on accidentally, telephoned her daughter for help in turning it off. But before her daughter arrived, two police officers came and told her to leave. "I told them, 'I'm staying.' And they said, 'Oh no, you're not, and they carried me out.' "
In the end, nearly every resident in the nine-story building ended up sitting at chairs and tables in some of the rooms and corridors of the apartment complex's adjoining wing, comforted in some cases by arriving relatives.
Since the elevators had shut down, those who could not walk were carried down in their wheelchairs. "The firemen should get a lot of credit," Ann Ryan, 79, said. "They were at the bottom of every stairwell helping people down."
Within a short time, residents on the second, third and fourth floors were advised they could return to their apartments. Those on the fifth and sixth floors were told to wait longer, to allow time for the smoke to clear.
Captain Camille said that when the firefighters -- eventually including every available firefighter in the city -- first arrived at the scene, they found Golden, the occupant of apartment 511, standing just outside the door, crying. "She said, 'It's my apartment that's burning.' "
He said investigators were interviewing Golden to try to determine what happened, and that it was expected that the American Red Cross would be coming by to offer her shelter.
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