Ten Escape Throop Apartment Fire
By: Jeremy Deebel
Updated: December 5, 2012
Throop, Lackawanna County-- Ten people are left without a place to stay after fire ripped through an apartment building in Throop early Wednesday morning.
It was shortly after 4AM when tenants smelled smoke and quickly got out of the building.
As Valerie Weekes stood outside her apartment building along Pancoast Street, firefighters managed to save a few of her most precious personal items.
Weekes noted, "They got my Bible and my pocketbook. And my neighbor gave me a sweater to put on. It's bad, because the smoke was so bad, I couldn't even get my shoes. I couldn't get anything."
Weekes says the smell of smoke woke her up in her second-floor apartment long before sunrise Wednesday morning.
She added, "I made it out of the house, and I started banging on my neighbors' doors, to see if they were out. I just said thank God that we're alive, you know? Because like I said, I was in there asleep."
Another tenant tried to douse the flames with a fire extinguisher-- to no avail.
It took firefighters about 90 minutes to bring the blaze under control.
Throop Fire Chief Eric Hartshorn explained, "(When we) got on scene, the first floor was heavy fire. Getting to the third floor was a challenge, the attic area. We couldn't find a crawl space, but we got it."
A man who lives in a first-floor apartment says he believes the fire may have started in his kitchen-- possibly from some grease left burning on a stove.
The man says his father has accidently left food cooking unattended in the past.
The man's father was taken to a nearby hospital for breathing in too much smoke.
He's expected to be okay.
Late Wednesday morning, fire officials confirmed the fire was the result of an accidental cooking mishap in that first-floor apartment.
