Residents in Lexington apartment buildings forced to evacuate during overnight fires
The Lexington Fire Department had to get residents out of multiple apartment buildings Wednesday night and Thursday morning after two structure fires broke out at separate locations.
The first fire was reported around 8 p.m. Wednesday at an apartment in the 2000 block of Armstrong Road, Battalion Chief Jordan Saas said. Investigators didn’t see any flames or smoke visible form outside the building, but they “quickly realized that there was a lot of smoke throughout the building,” Saas said.
No one lived in the apartment where the fire started, but there were residents in other apartments in the building. The incident was upgraded to a second-alarm fire because it was a large, occupied residential building, Saas said. Upgrading to a second-alarm fire allows the department to quickly devote more personnel and resources to a scene.
The whole building was evacuated as firefighters battled with the smoke and heat inside.
“Smoke kills more people than fire does,” Saas said of the firefighters’ decision to evacuate the building.
Firefighters cut a hole in the roof of the building to perform “vertical ventilation,” which helped get smoke and hot gases out of the building, Saas said. The damage to the building was mostly smoke related. The apartment in which the fire started and the attic space and roof were affected. No one was displaced from their homes, Saas said.
There weren’t any injuries reported as a result of the fire, Saas said.
Second Lexington fire in hours was ‘quickly extinguished’
The second fire was reported around 1 a.m. Thursday in the 400 block of Rogers Road, Saas said. Smoke was visible from outside the apartment building when firefighters arrived. The fire was quickly extinguished, but evacuating everyone inside at 1 a.m. was a challenge.
“It’s difficult to get people evacuated in the middle of the night – it requires a lot of personnel,” Saas said. “That’s why having operational smoke alarms is so important – it starts the ‘waking up process’ early.”
The fire was contained to one apartment, Saas said. No other apartments appeared to suffer any damage.
One person was checked out for injuries and treated on scene, but they didn’t need to be transported to a hospital, Saas said. It was unclear if anyone was displaced from their home as a result of the second fire.
Investigators were still working Thursday morning to determine the cause of both fires, Saas said.