Thomas Breen photos
Yamile Barrios with dog Natasha, friend Digna Martinez, and wife Lisa Rivera. Below: 309 Grand.
Lisa Rivera was making a caramel cappuccino for her wife in their third-floor Grand Avenue apartment when she heard a loud beep. She didn’t pay it any mind.
The alarm sounded again just a few seconds later. This time she left her kitchen, walked towards her living room, and saw flames bursting through the window from her front fire escape-turned-porch.
Contributed photo
Rivera and Berrios live in a top-floor apartment at 309 Grand Ave., a three-story, six-unit, mixed-residential-commercial building near the corner of Blatchley Avenue in Fair Haven.
They are two of eight tenants who were displaced by a fire that took place on their building’s third floor Wednesday afternoon. (An earlier version of this story referred to 16 tenants; it turns out the others inside the building at the time of the fire were not tenants, according to the landlord.)
Assistant Fire Chief Mark Vendetto said that one tenant was transported to Yale New Haven Hospital with minor injuries. Two ground-floor businesses, Velez Grocery and La Tapatia bakery, will be closed temporarily as the department investigates the extent of the fire’s damage.
The fire was concentrated on the front exterior of the third floor, according to Vendetto, and the building will be able to be inhabited again. The cause of the fire is still under investigation. The Red Cross was one the scene helping the displaced find temporary emergency shelter.
“They really did do a great job in stopping it really quickly,” Vendetto said about the 32 firefighters from Engines 4, 5, 10, 17, Trucks 1 and 3, Rescue 1, Cars 32 and 33, and Special Operations Command who responded to the call. “We were able to get on the scene quick.”
He said the department received a call about the fire at 2:35 p.m.. Firefighters were on the scene within three minutes, and had the fire under control by 3:04.
“It was a tremendous job by the fire department.”
About That Couch …
Rivera said that she and her wife and their bijou-mix dog Natasha have been living at 309 Grand for about a year and a half.
They were homeless before that, she said. They found the apartment with the help of the local homeless support nonprofit Columbus House.
“I was just packing earlier today,” she said in tears as she stood on the sidewalk outside her apartment, wrapped in a white towel and still wearing bathroom slippers. She and Berrios had found a new apartment in West Haven and were preparing to move.
“I just lost everything,” she said, wiping her face dry. “I know it’s only material things, and thank God we’re alive. But now I don’t have nothing.”
Rivera said she’s not sure what, or who, caused the fire.
She has her suspicions.
She said she kept a couch and two chairs on a fire escape that she used as a porch outside her front window. She said strangers often climbed up from lower levels to sit on her couch and smoke at all hours of the day and night.
She didn’t see anyone out on the porch Wednesday. Instead, after she heard the smoke detectors blaring, all she saw when she out out that window were flames.
“By the time I looked, the porch was on fire, and we ran outside.”
“Get Out! Get Out!”
Lindell Atkinson (pictured) said he lives in an apartment on the building’s second floor, and was inside when the fire started.
“When I heard the smoke detector I knew I had to get out of there,” he said. He said he heard people upstairs screaming, “Get out! Get out!” He saw an orange glow from his window, and so he grabbed his cellphone and sprinted downstairs.
Dave Hall said he was visiting his friend Atkinson, but had gone out to the store a few minutes earlier to buy some candy.
“When I came out and looked up the street, I said, ‘What the fuck!’ The windows started exploding.”
Eddie Smith and Doreen Girimante were also in the building in a different second story apartment at the time of the fire. “Flames were shooting out of the window,” Girimante said. “We got out of there before it got too bad,” added Smith.
They said they have only been living in their apartment for six months, and did not know where they would go after the help from Red Cross ends.