Lawrence firefighters called to 2 fires nearly simultaneously on hot afternoon
photo by: Elvyn Jones
Lawrence-Douglas County Fire Medical first responders were kept busy Saturday fighting two fires that were reported almost simultaneously during the hot afternoon.
At about 2:20 p.m. Saturday, a fire was reported at 336 Elm St. in North Lawrence. Just minutes later, at 2:24 p.m., firefighters were dispatched to a fire in an office building at 545 Columbia Drive. No one was injured in either fire.
The fire at 336 Elm St. displaced two tenants of the two-story wood-frame rental house owned by Jan Hurst, of Lawrence, said Lawrence-Douglas County Fire Medical acting shift commander Chris Morrow.
Hurst said the tenants weren’t home when the fire started on the porch of the building. A neighbor to the west of the house notified her of the fire after reporting it, she said.
“The house had beautiful wood floors,” she said. “My husband bugged me to sell it, but I loved that house.”
photo by: Elvyn Jones
Morrow said the fire was brought under control at about 3 p.m. There was some damage to the interior to the house, but most of the damage was confined to the porch and exterior, he said.
Five Lawrence fire department trucks responded to the Elm Street incident, so that firefighters could be rested on the hot afternoon, Morrow said.
“I tried to call in another truck so we could rotate more firefighters through, but there was nothing available with the other fire,” he said. “Two working fires at the same time pretty much depletes our resources.”
Other city fire units were responding to the fire at 545 Columbia Drive, which is one block west of the Dillons store at the intersection of Sixth Street and Lawrence Avenue.
The office building is the home of Keller Williams Realty, Lawrence Dental Solutions, Movement Mortgage and Next Gen Hearing, said John Esau, a realtor with Keller Williams and a member of the partnership that owns the building.
Esau said he was working alone on the second floor of the building when he got a phone call from a Keller Williams agent telling him there was traffic on the police scanner of a structure fire at 545 Columbia Drive. There was no sign of the fire upstairs, nor were the building’s smoke alarms sounding on that floor, Esau said, but he ran into heavy smoke when he descended to the first floor to investigate.
Shaun Coffey, acting fire chief of LDCFM, said he requested mutual aid from the Wakarusa Township and Overland Park fire departments to help with the fire. The fire was controlled at about 4 p.m.
Damage was mostly confined to the first floor of the building, Coffey said.
There is no damage estimate yet for either building, and the causes of both fires remain under investigation, Coffey and Morrow said.
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