Firefighters from four departments were called in Wednesday to douse a predawn apartment fire near the junction of I-85 and I-285 in College Park.
The blaze at the Old Town Villa complex in the 2200 block of Godby Road was reported about 5:30 a.m. by a resident who noticed fire inside the walls of a unit, according to College Park Fire Chief Wade Elmore.
“When our first unit arrived, the fire was coming through the roof,” Elmore told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “Our units secured water sources and went in, but by that time, [the fire] had already gotten into the attic and it spread across the whole building.”
No injuries were reported.
Elmore said about 35 to 40 firefighters from College Park, East Point, Fulton County and Clayton County responded to the three-alarm fire.
The 14-unit building, an older structure with no firewalls, was a total loss, he said.
The American Red Cross was en route to assist the 14 adults and 19 children displaced by the fire.
“Luckily, I was awake and saw the smoke,” said one of those residents, Steven Blevins.
“I went outside to my first neighbor’s door, banged on her door and everybody got out,” Blevins said, adding that he then knocked on the doors of three more apartments.
“Some people thought I was playing,” he said. “They were like, ‘you’re high man, you’re just high.’”
Blevins, who has lived at the complex for about a year, said, “everything happens for a reason, but I feel like I earned my wings today. I saved four lives.”
Another resident, Bruce Schaffer, said someone banged on his door, telling him to get his wife and three children out of the burning building.
“By the time I ran upstairs to tell my family to put some clothes on, the police were banging the door, saying come out now,” Schaffer said. By that point, “smoke was already starting to come in the door.”
“We didn’t really believe it was going to be a fire of this magnitude,” he said. “That’s what still has me shaken up right now, the fact that we didn’t take it as seriously as we should have and didn’t make it out as fast as we should have.”
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