Tuesday, October 23, 2012
An intense fire
that burned for hours in south Baltimore left a firefighter injured and
sent five others to the hospital early Monday morning.
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The fire,
which started on the first floor and spread to two upper floors,
escalated to two alarms at about 3:45 a.m. in the 1200 block of Battery
Avenue on the southern edge of Federal Hill. Everyone inside the house
was able to evacuate safely.
Bobby
Ohlberter, the son of the homeowners where the fire started, said he
ran to the scene once he received their frantic phone call. He said they
were shaken, but thankfully OK.
"Thank
God they're OK. Material things don’t really matter to me. I don't care
about that. Life's more important. I just had a son myself," Ohlberter
said.
Many neighbors gathered on the sidewalk to see what was going on after they were awakened by the sirens and commotion.
"By
the time I woke up the house was fully engulfed. I saw the flames
shooting up from the roof. And at first, I went up on my deck to see
what was going on but there was so much smoke you couldn't even breathe
up there so I decided to walk around here to see what was going on,"
neighbor Isabell Obert said.
Firefighters
aggressively started to fight the fire from the inside and outside but
were ordered back outside as the fire intensified, making the structure
unstable. WBAL-TV 11 News reporter Kim Dacey said efforts to extinguish
the fire were hampered by combustible debris inside the house, which
appeared to be under renovation.
"Because
of all this debris inside it continued to fuel this fire, created
unsafe conditions so it was mandatory for us to evacuate those members
(firefighters). We just can't risk them being in such dangerous
conditions," Baltimore City Fire spokesman Chief Kevin Cartwright said.
Cartwright
said the fire caused a portion of the second floor to collapse onto the
first floor. A firefighter who fell off a ladder suffered an ankle
injury, but is expected to be OK, officials said
Read more:
http://www.wbaltv.com/news/maryland/baltimore-city/Firefighter-5-others-injured-in-2-alarm-south-Baltimore-blaze/-/10131532/17078156/-/myb66l/-/index.html#ixzz2AAHIxfYb
