An apartment fire that broke out early Tuesday amid high winds in Concord’s South End has damaged the building’s top floors and displaced several tenants, according to fire officials. No injuries were reported.
The fire was at 20-22 Broadway, just across from one of the city’s fire stations. Fire Chief Dan Andrus said responders rushed to the building about 9:10 a.m., after spotting a woman run outside and smoke wafting from an upper-story window.
“There was heavy fire at the rear of the three-story structure climbing the wall and penetrating into the attic space,” Andrus said in a press release, adding that a second alarm was soon called because of the wind conditions, and because units from the station were across town in a training.
The fire was quickly doused and fully contained within 30 minutes.
“Crews moved aggressively,” Andrus said, “extending hose lines up the interior stairs to fight the fire from the inside and using a tower ladder truck to get crews to the roof to open the attic space.”
Eleven people live in the building and several were home at the time, Andrus said. Three escaped through a second-story window and two of them dropped to the ground from the roof of a porch. A driver passing by pulled his truck next to the building and assisted a third person down from the roof. He then went to a side door and alerted a man to the fire and carried his 6-year-old child outside.
All of the tenants have relocated with friends or relatives, Andrus said.
Crews from Allenstown, Boscawen, Bow, Chichester, Hopkinton, Hooksett and Pembroke assisted in the response, Andrus said.
Officials have yet to determine a cause or fully assess the structural damage. Broadway was closed to traffic for several hours as cleanup efforts continued.
(Jeremy Blackman can be reached at 369-3319, jblackman@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @JBlackmanCM.)