It was “beyond” scary, she said. She lost a house to a fire 10 years ago and “it was deja vu all over again, we thought we would lose everything.”
Her roommate, Valerie Smith, said “the building was up in flames and we could feel the heat as we walked out the door to move our cars.”
Candy Burns lives right across the street from the abandoned warehouse on Laurel Avenue.
“We got evacuated, I live right on the street right across,” she said. “They woke us up about 5:10 a.m., my daughter came downstairs and said, ‘We’ve got to get out in a hurry the building’s on fire.’
“We had to get our cars and by the time we got to them they were like so hot and we had to hurry up and get out of there. The cars probably would have not made it if we hadn’t gotten out when we did.”
Crews were still hosing down her house at around 9:30 a.m. The fire was extinguished but fire crews were still shooting water on the building long after to make sure there were no hot spots.
Barry Diangelo was up and filming the fire even before the fire department arrived at around 4:30 a.m.
“It was scary at night time because the clouds of smoke was billowing up, you could feel the heat,” he said.
He lives two blocks over and started knocking on his neighbors’ doors.
“I just started knocking on doors and they go like, ‘Who is it?’ Then they looked out the window and was like, ‘Oh my God!’ You could see the flames from our front porch,” he said.
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