A Detroit woman was taken to the hospital for minor smoke inhalation and her apartment was damaged early Tuesday in a fire at 10 Wakefield Place off Route 100 in that town.
Bobbie Taylor was at home when the fire broke out around a ceiling fan in her bathroom, according to Pittsfield fire Chief Bernard Williams, who was the first to arrive at the scene just after 4 a.m.
The Office of State Fire Marshal was at the scene later in the morning to help determine the cause of the fire in the approximately 40-by-50- foot, one-story wooden building which has four apartments and is about 10 years old, according to Williams.
“At this time, it’s still under investigation,” he said, mid-morning Tuesday.
Eight people live in the building and Taylor is the lone occupant of the apartment where the fire broke out, he said. The tenants were outside when Williams arrived and no one else was injured, he said. Taylor was taken by Sebasticook Valley Hospital Ambulance to Northern Light Sebasticook Valley Hospital in Pittsfield and later released, he said.
Between 25 and 35 firefighters from Pittsfield, Detroit, Newport, Plymouth and Corinna responded to the fire, he said. Williams said that when he arrived, fire was in the ceiling.
“Smoke was just billowing out of those vents on the ends of the building,” he said. “When I got there and looked up through the hole in the ceiling, there was a big, red glow.”
The apartment building, owned by Chad Tozier, is in a complex of five apartment buildings, according to Williams.
He said the Salvation Army is putting Taylor up in a motel for a few days.
“It wasn’t destroyed,” he said of her apartment. “She’s going to lose some stuff because of water, but there’s not a whole lot of value to it. She had a lot of stuff.”
He said Taylor has no renters insurance, which he says is “dirt cheap,” and he recommends people who rent get it.
“The only thing you’re insuring is what you own,” he said. “We run into a lot of renters who don’t have it, but if the house burns down, you’ve got nothing. People just don’t understand what it costs to start replacing stuff.”
Tozier, the building owner, does have building insurance, according to Williams.
“That’ll fix the property, but it doesn’t do anything for the tenants,” he said.
The other building tenants were able to go back inside their apartments, but one apartment got a little water in it when a pipe broke and the floor got wet, according to Williams. He said there was no smoke damage.
“The smoke was all up above the ceiling — most of it,” he said.
The building had smoke detectors, which went off, he said. Firefighters were at the scene about 1 1/2 hours, according to Williams.
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