Fire in San Francisco's Mission - Treat and 24th. Five people taken to the hospital. pic.twitter.com/36eDoLiWHM
— Amy Hollyfield (@amyhollyfield) March 11, 2015
Five people were injured, and two more people may or may not be hurt, after a two-alarm fire tore through a building in the Mission District Wednesday morning.
It was around 4:30 this morning when San Francisco Fire Department crews were called to 3049 24th Street, a building that contains Maurice's Corner Liquors and an upstairs apartment.
There they found, San Francisco Fire Captain Tom Abbott tells KTVU, "a tragic and scary scene."
"You had heavy, dark, black smoke billowing out the second floor flat windows," he said, and a mother, father, two sons, and a daughter that required rescue. (According to KTVU, earlier reports that the mother was also rescued were incorrect, as "She was not at home at the time of the fire." KTVU has since removed that note.)
ABC7 reports that "Two of the boys were rescued out of a front window of the residence using a ladder. The daughter was brought out through a front entrance."
“They (the firefighters) took a ladder off their truck and extended it to the window,” Abbot told KTVU. “The teenager - really heroic - passed the 6-year-old boy and made sure he got out.”
.@sfpd now says 5 people taken to hospital, conditions unknown. #SF #Mission 2alarm fire at 2nd story apt. pic.twitter.com/u1PeKXO88k
— Stephanie Chuang (@StephChuang) March 11, 2015
A second team of rescuers "went right upstairs. There was no hose line in place, no water on the fire. The fire was free burning. They found a 14-year-old girl at the top of the stairs,” Abbot says. They then "ducked under the fire, went down the hallway and continued to the rear" to rescue the father.
"It was a tricky rescue," SFFD Chief Joanne Hayes-White told NBC Bay Area. "It was a difficult scene. There was screaming and yelling. It was emotional."
Hayes-White told CBS5 that the father and two of the kids were transported to San Francisco General Hospital with life-threatening injuries, reportedly from smoke inhalation.
The mother and the teenaged son were taken to Saint Francis Memorial Hospital with serious smoke inhalation injuries, an SFFD spokesperson told KTVU Wednesday afternoon.
According to NBC, two more people were sleeping on mattresses inside Maurice's Corner Liquors, and were trapped because the door was padlocked shut from the outside.
After firefighters cut the locks, the two rescued people "took off and their conditions aren't known," NBC reports.
By 5 a.m., the blaze had been controlled. According to SFFD officials, arson investigators remain on the scene this morning to determine the cause of the blaze.