Several Families People Displaced Following Massive Ambridge Row House Fire
AMBRIDGE (KDKA) -- Several families have been forced from their homes after a string of apartments caught fire in Beaver County early Sunday morning.
The flames caused serious damage and took more than a dozen fire departments to manage the blaze.
Investigators are now wondering what caused the fire and how nobody was injured.
Around 3:30 a.m. on Sunday, cell phone video captured the intense scene as flames were seen tearing through a strip of row houses along Glenwood Avenue in Ambridge.
The fire broke out inside one of the apartment units and quickly spread to four others.
"It was burning between the roof and the ceilings of the apartments. Our aerial streams were not hitting the fire, so we had to put firefighters in to pull the ceilings down and actually reach the fire," said Ambridge Fire Chief Rob Gottschalk.
Two homes were destroyed in the blaze.
The mother of Vaughn Bridges watched her home catch fire on video chat while vacationing in Virginia.
"She had some important stuff she wanted me to get out of there. Credit cards, social security stuff. You can see It just got dark. See all the smoke damage," Bridges said.
The Red Cross is now helping these families.
While the fire was damaging, scattering debris, and caused some portions of the building to collapse, fortunately, everybody escaped the smoke and flames unharmed.
"All these units were evacuated. They were occupied, people were sleeping. They went and knocked on doors and everything to get people out," Chief Gottschalk said.
At one point, an accelerant-sniffing dog was brought in to check out the scene of the fire, but officials are not suspecting anything suspicious at this time.
The cause of the fire remains under investigation.