East Lyme — The morning after a three-alarm fire ripped through his apartment and three others in a residential section of the Midway Plaza strip mall, Kevin Yin just wanted to get inside so he could find out if his dog died in the blaze — or somehow escaped.
It was shortly before 5 Monday evening when Yin had heard the first shouts of “fire” outside of the massage business he’d owned for about four years at 170 Flanders Road. The storefront sat a few doors down from the second-story apartment he rented.
“I want to go inside, save my dog,” he recounted. But flames were already beginning to billow from the roof above the end unit. Soon, a black plume would be visible for miles. He was told he couldn’t go in, he said.
By Tuesday morning, his apartment was a roofless expanse of wet char. The blaze had made its way nearly halfway across the eight-unit second floor the night before and taken about two hours to get under control. One member of the Flanders Fire Department was transported to Lawrence + Memorial Hospital and released around midnight related to injuries he received while fighting the fire, according to department Chief Chris Taylor.
Fire Marshal John Way said he looked for Yin’s dog while he was in the apartment Monday night but didn’t find anything. He planned to coordinate with building official Steve Way and the property owner’s insurance company to determine when it was safe for residents to go back into the most heavily damaged apartments to retrieve important belongings.
“There’s probably nothing that is really salvageable between the damage from the fire and all the water that was poured on it,” the fire marshal said. “Thousands of gallons of water unfortunately destroys things.”
He said he didn’t know the cause yet, though witness statements and video footage pointed toward the attic space at the far right of the building as the likely origin site.
So Yin waited, staring up at the space over his apartment where the roof used to be.
“I don’t know,” he said. “My dog maybe escape.”
The rescues
Around the same time Yin emerged from his storefront to find smoke, Tim Edgett was in back knocking on apartment doors as he screamed for his neighbors to get out of the building.
Edgett, who was in the process of moving out of his apartment that day, had been on his way to throw trash into a dumpster when he spotted smoke billowing out of the eaves five units away from his.
“I grabbed the fire extinguisher and ran over like I was going to put it out, but realized by the time I got there that the little fire extinguisher wasn’t going to do anything,” he said.
Instead, he used the heavy canister to bang on the door of an apartment where a worried mother was getting no response from her sleeping son-in-law. When the man still couldn’t be roused, Edgett kicked in the door and got him out.
Edgett on Tuesday morning acknowledged his actions helped several people to safety, but said the one apartment door he didn’t knock on kept him up all night.
Firefighters were dispatched to the scene at 4:48 p.m., according to dispatch logs. The call was for a possible fire with someone trapped inside, according to officials.
The logs showed the Niantic Fire Department’s deputy chief got to the scene within four minutes and a Flanders Fire Department engine arrived one minute later. Flanders Chief Chris Taylor said some crews split off to put out the fire while some went to help the man who could not extricate himself from his apartment.
That’s the one apartment Edgett didn’t check on. He said his own feelings of regret remain even though he knows the man is safe now.
“I just remember I was trying to get everyone out,” Edgett said. “That one that I missed has just been haunting me.”
The first ladder truck showed up 14 minutes after the initial dispatch, according to the logs, with the Flanders firefighters positioning behind the building. The Niantic ladder truck arrived two minutes later, set up in front of the building, and was joined five minutes after that by Waterford’s ladder truck.
Water was everywhere, pouring in rivulets from the second story down the picture window of The Boss Babe Beauty salon. It coursed through the parking lot and some of it turned to ice as temperatures breached the cold side of 20 degrees. Firefighters hailing from Mystic to Westbrook lined Route 161, which was closed from the Stop and Shop supermarket to Society Road for about four hours.
The Red Cross assisted 17 people who were displaced by the fire, according to a spokesman. Property owner Joe DiBuono on Tuesday morning said nobody in the eight apartments was allowed back in overnight, but said the four apartments without fire damage should be habitable as soon as the fire marshal gives the go-ahead.
“I really only have three families displaced,” he said. He vowed to “fast track” the repairs to the apartments but said it would probably take at least three months before anyone can move back in.
He said the damage to the first-floor businesses came from water, not fire — and four businesses got the brunt of it: Weight No More, The Boss Babe Beauty, Your CBD Store and Platinum Prep Meals.
Rachael Bingaman, owner of The Boss Babe Beauty for a year now, set up a crowdfunding page that by 7 p.m. Tuesday had raised $1,445 for the families whose apartments burned in the fire.
“I wanted to start a GoFundMe for the families that lost everything,” she said. “That’s more of my concern than the businesses.”
She already had been planning to expand in a nearby corner unit that wasn’t touched by the fire. In the meantime, she said, the other salon she runs in Westerly gives her seven employees from the East Lyme location a place to work if their clients are willing to travel.
The unknown is the scariest part of the whole situation, according to Bingaman. “We had to overcome COVID, and now this,” she said.
Clay Percy, owner of Your CBD Store in multiple locations along the shoreline, stepped into the ruined storefront for the first time Tuesday afternoon. “It wasn’t easy to swallow walking in there,” he said.
He said he’d given the store a “complete makeover” just two weeks prior as part of its rebranding and had just received a large shipment of inventory the morning of the fire.
“It’s going to be tough to overcome, but we will be resilient as we’ve had to be as small business owners during this pandemic,” he said.
‘Everything worked’
Both the fire marshal and plaza owner said the damage could have been much worse if it weren’t for aggressive fire suppression efforts combined with fire safety features in the roughly 40-year-old plaza.
“The fire departments did a great job,” DiBuono said. “The inspectors did a great job. And the firewalls did a great job.”
Way described firewalls as separations made of a drywall material put in the attic to hold back fire long enough to “buy time” for people to get out. He said the feature is used in new buildings to seal off each individual apartment, though it was used more sparingly in older construction.
He said the firewall did its job, helping to halt the flames where it was installed about halfway through the building.
“The fire started to breach it a little bit because it’s only good for so long, but the timing of the fire departments and the extinguishing tactics prevented (the fire) from going any further,” he said.
DiBuono put it this way: “Everything and everybody worked as it was supposed to.”
Businesses in the unaffected sections of the plaza were free to open Tuesday morning, according to DiBuono. He said utilities were being restored in the affected areas.
Sergey’s Smoke and Nautical Gift Shop, which is situated on the outer bounds of the affected area, was open despite water damage in the back. Owner Sergey Dsoy said he was waiting for someone from his insurance company to come out and survey the damage.
He said it had been hard for him to see the fire come so close to the shop he’s had for almost two decades. But he watched anyway.
“You build a place, 17 years, you think you can sit at home? No,” he said.
Editor’s Note: This version corrects who arrived on the scene of the fire first.