Garland Apartment Building Destroyed By Fire
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GARLAND (CBSDFW.COM) - Emergency crews in Garland battled a two-alarm fire at an apartment complex early Wednesday morning. The flames were first reported at around 1:30 a.m. at the Forest Glen Apartments, located in the 400 block of South Jupiter Road.
Firefighters arrived to find heavy flames and smoke, and crews from other cities quickly came to help out.
Although the cause of the fire has not yet been determined, investigators stated that it began inside of a first-floor unit and spread to the second story -- then ultimately to the roof of the building, which collapsed during the blaze.
A resident said that nobody was inside of the unit where the fire is believed to have started. The family that lives there was not home at the time of the incident.
The caved in roof made it harder for emergency workers to fight the fire, officials explained, as it caused more things in the middle of the apartment building to burn -- including roofing materials like tar and asphalt.
The weather also presented difficulties for firefighters. "Even though it's cool outside, it's still very humid to be fighting fire," said fire investigator Christopher Balanciere with the Garland Fire Department. "We had a lot of manpower issues and that's why it ended up being a two-alarm fire, just because we needed a lot of bodies so that we could rotate people out -- keep them fresh, keep them hydrated."
Nobody was hurt during this incident, but eight families -- about 30 people total -- are now without a home. Volunteers with the American Red Cross will be helping out the victims of the eight apartment units that were destroyed, while the property manager will try to relocate families within the apartment complex.
One resident said that he was unable to save his 2-month-old kitten and his mother's 10 birds, because his instinct was to alert family members and neighbors. "I started banging on doors, on the windows," said resident Carlos Hernandez early Wednesday morning. "I started going around the apartments knocking on windows, trying to let them know that there's a fire, that they need to evacuate quick."
The fire has since been extinguished, but crews remained at the scene and continued to search for hot spots more than five hours after the blaze began.