When Claudia Chapman woke up to yelling just after midnight on Saturday morning, she thought an intruder was in her home. After she woke up her boyfriend, James Rudolph, he opened her bedroom door to find the building in flames. Together, the pair jumped from Champan’s second-story window to escape the fire, with her dog Winnie in hand.
On the other side of the duplex, Molly Sullivan and Taylor Vitti were asleep when a pizza delivery man banged on their door, waking them up. Their house was on fire and they needed to get out, immediately. They ran down the stairs and burst out the front door as Chapman and Rudolph jumped.
Concord fire responded to a call at 12:18 a.m. By 4:30 a.m., units cleared the three-alarm scene. The house, which was engulfed by flames from all three floors up to the attic, is now inhabitable, said Mark Herbert, the deputy chief of operations at the Concord fire department.
With no belongings, nor a place to live, ahead of the school year – Chapman, Vitti and Sullivan, who are law students at the University of New Hampshire Franklin Pierce School of Law, turned to the community for help.
Since Saturday night, two GoFundMe pages have been made for the former tenants. A post from Rudolph, who was asking for help on behalf of himself and Chapman, detailed that they lost everything from wallets and passports to electronics and furniture.
“Claudia is having to begin rebuilding what took her entire life to build,” he wrote.
Rudolph attached photos of the apartment in the aftermath – with nondescript charred rubble and a burnt sofa the remnants of Champman’s belongings. Over $10,000 had been donated by midday Thursday.
The same level of support has been there for Vitti and Sullivan.
Both Vitti and Sullivan are second-year law students, who recently moved into the Rumford Street duplex ahead of the new year. Now, they’ve lost everything in the fire, according to the GoFundMe description.
The cause of the fire is still under investigation, according to Herbert.
Fighting the fire was also not without its challenges on Sunday morning.
One of the first hoses used by firefighters on the scene blew, said Herbert. Then the fire hydrant, which was supposed to be the primary water source, shot out of the ground, leaving a 20-foot geyser and the hydrant in the street.
“I’ve never seen that before,” said Herbert.
Crews then switched to a different hydrant to continue battling the blaze.
“The company there did exceptionally well with the challenges early on,” said Herbert, who arrived on scene later in the night. “They worked really hard for a challenging fire on a hot night.”