11:30 pm January 7, 2010, units from the Long Beach Fire Department responded to a report of a structure fire at 1100 Elm Ave.\u00a0 Engine 3 arrived on scene within a matter of minutes and found a first floor apartment fully involved in fire with fire extending to an adjacent unit.\u00a0 The fire inside the involved apartment was so intense that flames reached the third floor landing.\u00a0 The elderly female resident of the involved apartment was found lying in the courtyard near a planter with severe burns to her body.\u00a0 Sadly she succumbed to her injuries and was deceased upon initial crews\u2019 arrival.\u00a0 Witnesses reported she walked from the apartment under her own power prior to collapsing in the courtyard. Witnesses report seeing the victim minutes before the fire and by all accounts was awake and alert before discovery of the fire.<\/p>\n
There were numerous oxygen tanks through out the apartment. It was reported that the resident was on home oxygen and was a smoker. The cause of the fire is currently under investigation.\u00a0 Witnesses reported hearing at least one explosion from inside the apartment.\u00a0 At least one ruptured oxygen cylinder was recovered by fire crews after the fire and would account for the sound and the rapid spread of the fire.\u00a0 One large oxygen tank was removed by firefighters that fortunately had not ruptured.\u00a0 Had it done so, several firefighters may have been seriously injured or killed.\u00a0 Oxygen is not in and of it self flammable but will accelerate an already burning fire. It took fire crews 10 \u2013 15 minutes to extinguish the blaze after mounting an aggressive attack on the seat of the fire.\u00a0 A thorough search was made of the apartment for additional victims.\u00a0 It was found that the victim\u2019s dog also perished in the fire.<\/p>\n
Damage is estimated at 75,000 \u2013100,000 dollars.\u00a0 The Red Cross was called out to provide shelter to residents of the apartment next door and to provide grief counseling to family members who came to the scene.\u00a0 A total of 30 firefighters responded to this incident.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
11:30 pm January 7, 2010, units from the Long Beach Fire Department responded to a report of a structure fire at 1100 Elm Ave.\u00a0 Engine 3 arrived on scene within a matter of minutes and found a first floor apartment fully involved in fire with fire extending to an adjacent unit.\u00a0 The fire inside the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1964","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-incidents"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/firechannel.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1964","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/firechannel.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/firechannel.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firechannel.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firechannel.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1964"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/firechannel.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1964\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1966,"href":"https:\/\/firechannel.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1964\/revisions\/1966"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/firechannel.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1964"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firechannel.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1964"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firechannel.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1964"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}