2 With Life-Threatening Injuries Pulled From Burning Reading Apartment
READING (CBS) – Two people with life-threatening injuries were pulled out of a fire at an apartment building in Reading early Monday morning.
Firefighters were called to the complex on High Street near the MBTA commuter rail station around 3:30 a.m. and found flames shooting out the windows of a third-floor apartment.
When they got inside that apartment they found two people unconscious, one by the front door and another further inside the unit. They performed CPR on both and then rushed them to the hospital. There's no word yet on their conditions and their names have not been made public.
Neighbor Jack Jansen described the victims: "He's elderly and she is in her 50s. They carried her out over someone's shoulder and started doing CPR on the street...They worked on her right on the sidewalk for a good 25 minutes, I was just hoping to see her move. And I didn't see that."
According to Jansen, the fire alarm goes off on a normal basis so people didn't believe the fire was real at first.
He had to get out of the smoky building himself. "I couldn't see anything though, so I took a big breath before I left my apartment and down the stairs I went. I banged on each door as I went down."
Resident Jody Beighley said, "We heard the police screaming, they're like 'get out, real fire, get out.' 'We got to put clothes on.' They're like 'get out.' And we come out here and the whole place was on fire."
"Somebody was smashing at my door and I thought I was being broken into. It was the fire department kicking it in, saying 'Get out, get out.'," said resident Ron Steenbruggen.
"Firefighters were able to knock down the fire inside the unit. They also had to search the entire building and evacuate the building," Reading Fire Chief Greg Burns told reporters. "It's a combustible building, it's brick on the outside but it's all combustible inside so we struck four alarms because we needed a lot of staff here to bring handlines in and ventilate and that sort of thing."
There are 12 units in the building, which does not have a sprinkler system, but it does have fire alarms. No one else was hurt.
There's no word yet on how the fire started.
