Fire burns Rural Street building
Residents safe, but blaze still under investigation
By Scott Rochat
Thursday, November 2, 2006
A kitchen fire was the cause of a blaze at 327 Rural Street on Thursday night, firefighters said this morning.
No one was injured, but it took about an hour and a half to finally extinguish the fire. Firefighters checking in with fire captain Larry Bess said it was difficult chasing everything down.
“You knock one end down and you see it at the other end smoking,” firefighter Jamey Pettigrew told Bess.
Firefighters arrived on the scene about 6:30 p.m. to find police already there and fire burning from top to bottom on the west wall of the building. The residents of the four apartments in the building had gotten out and were waiting across the street.
“In another 10 minutes, we would have really been chasing it,” said Bess, the scene commander.
According to the Emporia fire department, the fire began with a kitchen fire in apartment No. 1 and spread to the outside after a failed attempt by residents to extinguish it.
Edward Murphy, who lived in apartment No. 1, said he had been settling down with family to watch a movie on TV when smoke started to pour out of the kitchen.
“It happened all of a sudden. It just flared up,” Murphy said. “All of a sudden, we saw there was a cloud billowing up and we knew we needed to get the hell out of there.”
In addition to knocking down the fire, firefighters had to re-enter the building several times to get medicine belonging to the residents.
No one was hurt in the fire. Bess said that damage to the building included the back of the building along the first and second floor and smoke damage in the back of apartment No. 1.