“She said, ‘The house is on fire,'” Douglas said.
Fortunately, Douglas’ 74-year-old mother and the rest of the residents of the seven-story Station 101 apartment building on Rantoul Street escaped unharmed in what Beverly Fire Department officials said could have turned into a much worse situation.
A fire that started in the kitchen of a fourth-floor apartment forced the evacuation of residents and caused about 30 of them to have to find another place to stay. A man in the apartment where the fire started was found unresponsive by firefighters in a smoke-filled bedroom, but he became alert when firefighters quickly got him outside and was seemingly uninjured, fire officials said.
Beverly fire Capt. Jeff Sirois said fire sprinklers proved effective in limiting the spread of the flames, although there was a “substantial” amount of smoke and water damage from the fourth floor to the first floor.
“In the grand scheme of things it could’ve been a lot worse if the building wasn’t sprinklered,” Sirois said.
Sirois said the cause of the fire is under investigation but might have been “cooking related.”
Firefighters were called to the building at 101 Rantoul St. at 11:45 p.m. and arrived to find the fourth-floor hallway filled with smoke from a kitchen fire in one of the apartments. Crews worked to fully extinguish the fire, which officials said had been held at bay by sprinklers.
Once the fire was out, crews ventilated the smoke and pulled ceiling tiles damaged by water on the first three floors. The Beverly Fire Department posted a fire watch overnight until the alarm system could be reactivated.
Station 101, formerly known as The Millery, has been an apartment building for decades. It has 99 one- and two-bedroom apartments and is valued at more than $10 million, according to city records. It is unclear how many people live there. Officials from Peabody Properties, which manages the building, did not return phone calls.
Douglas, 48, praised firefighters as well as the management company and the American Red Cross for their response to the fire. Douglas said the Red Cross gave residents gift cards for breakfast and hotel rooms. She and her mother spent Wednesday night in a hotel and were expected to stay one more night before returning to their apartment on Friday.
“Everybody was right on top of everything,” Douglas said.
Douglas said her apartment, which is two floors below the apartment where the fire started, had very little damage, other than wet furniture and rugs. She said there was up to two inches of water on the floor in the hallways below the fourth floor.
“For me, my mom got out,” she said. “Everything else is material stuff.”
