A neighbor who saw smoke coming from an apartment at 49 Tillotson Road on the morning of Sept. 4 alerted the Needham Fire Department. The occupants safely escaped the two-alarm fire at the six-unit apartment building.
“The woman in the apartment that caught fire was home and she was self-evacuating at the time,” said Assistant Fire Chief Donald Anastasi. “As we searched the apartment building, all the other apartments were clear and empty.”
The cause of the fire in the basement-level apartment has not yet been determined, but Anastasi said it appeared to have started in the kitchen area. The apartment was heavily damaged and he said there is extensive smoke damage throughout the building.
Fire departments from neighboring towns including Wellesley, Westwood, Dedham, Newton and Brookline sent units to assist Needham firefighters. Some were on site at the fire while others covered the Needham fire station.
Anastasi explained that the second alarm brings additional engines to the fire to help with the various tasks, including search and rescue.
“In an apartment building like that we need to do a lot of simultaneous actions,” said Anastasi. “It’s a six-apartment complex and there was smoke coming out of all the apartments. So you at first need to identify the fire apartment and simultaneously evacuate the entire building. So as you’re putting the fire out in the basement apartment you’re searching and doing rescues throughout the rest of the building to ensure that everybody’s been evacuated,” he said.
Residential fires are less common in Needham and many other communities now because of fire prevention efforts and changes in building codes, including the use of sprinkler systems, said Needham Fire Chief Thomas Conroy.
“There’s really never been a large loss of life when there is a sprinkler system in use and in use properly,” said Conroy. “That’s a huge deterrent as far as fires go because statistically when you have a building fire and there are sprinklers in the building it will put out 95% of the fire.”
The Tillotson Road apartment complex was built before sprinklers were required. It has smoke detectors but no sprinkler system.
Conroy said that current codes for individual residences require smoke detectors and carbon monoxide detectors, but efforts are underway to also require sprinkler systems. “The fire chiefs of Massachusetts are working on legislation right now to try to get residential sprinklers into residential homes. That’s been at the State House for a while and they’re still working on that,” he said.
With the extent of the damage to the Tilloston Road apartments, building owner Petrini Corporation relocated the residents from all six units to the Sheraton Needham Hotel. Some residents will return to their apartments this week, but the unit that had the fire will take much longer to repair.
Although all the residents were safe, the occupant of the apartment that caught fire lost some pets. “Unfortunately some of her pets didn’t make it,” said Anastasi. “She was pretty upset about that.” He said those pets were affected by smoke before the fire department arrived. But there was a cat found in an adjacent apartment that survived.
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