LYNN — A fire broke out early Wednesday morning on Rogers Avenue that spread to multiple buildings in the area before it was extinguished by the fire department.
“It came in as a dumpster fire between two buildings. I was on the road and I saw the smoke, and it appeared to be more than a dumpster fire,” District Fire Chief Joseph Zukas said. “When the first crews got here, they reported a working fire, and they encountered a big ball of fire up against the side of one of the buildings.”
Zukas continued, “Once we knocked the main body of fire down, we went inside, up into the second and third floors. We opened up ceilings and walls… It was labor-intensive, we had a lot of fire.”
He noted that at that point, he struck a second alarm upon arriving on the scene.
“I knew we were going to need a lot of bodies and have to rotate a lot of bodies… Once we were inside, it was a lot of work to open up the ceilings and walls,” Zukas said. “The guys did a great job under severe heat conditions — and they had to put several holes in the roof to release the heat.”
Zukas said that “a lot of people live in the building.”
“We had a potential for a major fire here, with a large apartment building with a lot of people living in it,” he said. “We did a search and everybody got out… We had one firefighter who was injured, and he was taken to Salem for observation, possibly heat exhaustion.”
The fire is under investigation. The fire marshal’s office, State Police and the Lynn Fire Investigative Unit collaborated on the investigation.
“Luckily, nobody got hurt,” Zukas said. “The guys did a phenomenal job under the severe heat conditions to knock this fire down quickly to save multiple buildings here — hundreds of people live within the multiple buildings here that potentially could have been without homes… So, tragedy was averted in Lynn.”
