She Got Out Just In Time

Ola Smith thought she could put out a small fire in her bedroom with a wet blanket. In less than a minute, flames burst out and ​“the heat pushed me back” and out the front door.

Soon Smith was among neighbors out on Ellsworth Avenue watching firefighters climb up and down ladders to put out a spreading blaze.

It took New Haven’s firefighters about 20 minutes to put out the two-alarm fire Monday morning at 368 – 70 Ellsworth, half a block north of Whalley in the Beaver Hills neighborhood. The fire erupted some 18 hours after a separate three-alarm blaze engulfed a house three blocks east on Sherman Avenue, where a 20-year-old man cooking a Mother’s Day feast for his mom had left a stove unattended.

Ola Smith, who’s 60, said she was washing clothes in her bathtub around 9:30 a.m. Monday in the second-floor apartment at 368 – 70 Ellsworth where she lives with her daughter, son-in-law, granddaughter, and step-grandson. She finished running the water. She came into her bedroom, which is adjacent to the bathroom. She had left a candle burning there, she said. ​“There was just a little left” of the candle. But she saw that a small fire had started.So she returned to the bathtub to soak a blanket. She figured the blanket would put out the fire.

Wrong.

“Less than 30 seconds” later she returned to the room with the blanket. ​“The heat pushed me back. It was raging. I couldn’t get back to that fire. I didn’t take no chances getting out of there.”

She ran down the front steps. The occupants of the other two apartments fled, too. None of them was injured.

The fire spread from the second to the third floor through a pipe chase, according to Fire Chief Michael Grant (pictured). Firefighters arrived and successfully cut off the fire on the third floor.

“The guys did a good job. They got in there,” Grant said at the scene. Two firefighters went to the hospital for treatment of minor injuries: one with burns to the neck, the other with a bruised shoulder.