[1]Flames shoot from a Chehalis apartment building on Northwest West Street and Rhode Island. / Courtesy photo by Lorena Perez
Updated at 10:09 a.m.
By Sharyn L. Decker
Lewis County Sirens news reporter
CHEHALIS – A three alarm fire chased several people from a Chehalis apartment building and a house next door early this morning with one man hospitalized for smoke inhalation.
Firefighters are still on the scene at Northwest West Street and Rhode Island, around the corner from Kaija’s garden store.
The walls of the older two-story wood structure still stand, but ladder trucks continued to pour water on its roof where flames could be seen.
The blaze broke out around 4:30 a.m. At 8 a.m., Fire Chief Walkowski said the best they could figure was eight individuals were in the building and two others in the one and half story house to its west.
Fifty-five-year-old Ken Jacaway was taken to Providence Centralia Hospital. Walkowski said others declined aid.
“We took a look at them, they were all good to go,” Walkowski said.
Twelve-year-old Rionna Harris said she looked out from her second-story bedroom window across the street and saw an orange glow and flames coming from the west side of the building. She woke her parents up.
“I just heard a bunch of pops, like gunshots going off, and a lady hollering,” Tony Harris said.
Harris said by the time he got outside, several of the apartments’ inhabitants were standing on the street.
The box-shaped building has four apartments, in a neighborhood of older and very close together homes.
“A lot of these houses are old, ours was built in 1908,” Annette Harris said. “I don’t know how old that is.”
Norma Taylor said she’s lived in the apartments ground level unit for about a year. She said she heard a lot of noise on the stairs, but nobody came to wake her up.
“Our bedroom’s right there, I looked in the bathroom and the wall was on fire,” she said.
Taylor, 55, said she has a cat that hadn’t yet been found.
She said she thinks eight people total live in the building.
“By the time we got out, there was one cop car,” she said. “We could account for everybody.”
Walkowski, who is chief of Centralia’s Riverside Fire Authority and recently took over as chief for the Chehalis Fire Department, said 47 firefighters from eight departments – from as far away as Olympia – responded.
“When we arrived, it was pretty much fully involved,” he said.
Thirty-six-year-old Tim Brandner, who was staying at his girlfriend’s house, said he was already awake when he realized the building next door was burning.
Katie Laverell said she grabbed her iPad, her dog and some clothing she had laid out for work.
“When I seen the blinds started melting on the inside, I said, we gotta go,” Brandner said.
Laverell, 24, is among those being helped by the Red Cross this morning.
She looked toward her house, not knowing when she might go back or what was lost.
Jacaway was released from the hospital and back on the street corner with Taylor before the fire hoses even shut down.
He said he was okay.
“We’re both here, that’s the best,” Jacaway said. “Everyone got out.”
[2]Firefighters from Chehalis, Centralia and six other departments responded to the early morning fire.
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[3]Katie Laverell, with her dog Samson, talks with a Red Cross worker as her boyfriend Tim Brandner looks on.
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[4]Witnesses said the fire jumped from the apartment building, on the right, to the single-family house next door, on the left.
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[5]Nearly 50 firefighters battled the morning fires on West Street in Chehalis.