Chief: Construction kept McPherson fire from spreading | Local News

Nearly all residents of the McPherson Park senior housing complex have returned to their residences after a kitchen fire broke out in an apartment Friday night, a Gloucester Housing Authority administrator said Monday.

The building’s construction played a role in firefighters being able to confine the blaze to the single unit, said Fire Chief Eric Smith and Alice Sheridan, assistant executive director of the housing authority, which owns and manages the six-story building at 31 Prospect St.

The man whose apartment was destroyed by the kitchen fire has been relocated to another apartment within the 97-unit building, Sheridan said. 

Neither she nor Smith could provide information Monday on the status of a woman who was rescued by firefighters and taken to Addison Gilbert Hospital after she fell inside her fourth-floor apartment while trying to evacuate. Smith did say her injuries were “non life-threatening.”

“We’re just so grateful for the support from the fire and police departments in helping us deal with this,” said Sheridan, “and we’re grateful no one else was hurt.”  

Sheridan said said all units other than 413, where the fire broke out, were inhabitable and that residents had returned. Preliminary estimates from the Gloucester Fire Department placed damages at $100,000.

Water seeped down into the walls of a number of units, she and Smith said, but none were damaged to the point of residents being forced from their homes.

Investigators said the fire, which filled hallways from the fourth floor up with smoke, had been ignited after the Apartment 413 resident left food cooking on the stove, then left the apartment to go to the grocery store. The man had returned to find city firefighters battling the blaze in his apartment.

Sheridan said McPherson’s ceilings, floors and walls are all sealed in cement, and that serves as a fire barrier that can keep a blaze from jumping from room to room. Smith said that’s why the Fire Department did not call for any of the residents to evacuate after arriving firefighters found they could contain the blaze to one unit.

“In situations like this,” Smith said, “the safest thing (for the other residents) to do is to shelter in place in their rooms. The safest thing to do is to keep the door closed, maybe put a wet towel across the bottom of the door to keep any smoke from seeping in, and open the window to get fresh air from the outside. But as soon as you open that door, then that only allows the smoke to get in and fill the room and that’s what causes more problems.

“Certainly in a high rise — and in one with this many units — the last thing you want is to have everybody trying to try running down the hallways and stairways to get outside all at once,” Smith said, “and that’s especially the case given (McPherson Park’s elderly) population.”

Smith said McPherson Park complies with all fire codes for a building constructed, as it was, in 1976, and said the facility has regularly passed fire inspections. But its only sprinkler systems cover the building’s common areas, not the individual rooms.

“If there was a sprinkler in that room, it probably would have put down this fire before we even got there,” Smith said. “And if you were to build this building today, you wouldn’t be able to do it without (in-room) sprinklers. At the same time, I know that trying to retrofit something like that into buildings like this can be cost-prohibitive.”

Sheridan noted that the Gloucester Housing Authority is developing a plan for upgrading McPherson through a $6.3 million grant extended in January by the state’s Department of Housing and Community Development. The grant is geared toward carrying out a phased rehabilitation of the building’s mechanical and electrical systems and other needs, but Sheridan said she was not sure whether it includes an expanded sprinkler system. GHA Executive Director David Houlden was not available Monday for comment.

Smith said the residents were allowed back inside their apartments over the weekend after the department confirmed that the building’s electrical and alarm systems were not damaged in the fire.

“The alarm system worked just the way it was supposed to,” he said. “There was no one in the apartment at the time, yet we got the alarm from that room and were able to respond quickly. That’s how it is supposed to work.”

All 97 residences at McPherson Park, the GHA’s largest senior housing facility, are single-bedroom units. The GHA’s largest overall complex is the 160-unit Riverdale Park, which houses families in a number of duplexes and four-unit buildings on Veterans Way and Patriot Circle.

Staff writer Ray Lamont can be reached at 978-675-2705, or via email at rlamont@gloucestetimes.com.