WILLIAMSBURG — A cigarette caused a fire that tore through two floors of a Williamsburg apartment building on Tuesday and left residents of three apartments temporarily homeless and scrambling to find shelter on couches and in beds of their friends and relatives, they said.
The two of the three displaced families have lived in their apartments for decades, they said.
"What am I going to do?" said a distraught Fresa Mejilla, 63, in Spanish, who's now sleeping in a cousin's bed who lives nearby. She'd been in her apartment for nearly 40 years and had $3,000 cash saved up that went up in the flames.
"Everything was burnt," she said.
Mejilla met with the Red Cross at the scene but they had records that said the damage in her apartment was minor. They offered her one night in a hotel but she declined, Michael Devulpillieres, a spokesman for the Red Cross said.
A repairman at the scene three days after the blaze, however, called Mejilla's apartment "not livable," citing fire damage to the front room, intense smoke and water damage throughout.
"It's a mess," Anton Suarez of Gold Star Restoration said.
The fire that started on Tuesday morning at 314 South 3rd St., began on the second floor and tore up to the apartment above, leaving two apartments destroyed and the apartment on the ground floor soaked with water, according to fire officials and Department of Buildings records.
Fire Marshals later determined that the blaze was caused by a cigarette and there were no working fire alarms present, FDNY officials said.
Eleven were injured, mostly with minor injuries, though one elderly woman was hospitalized for two days for smoke inhalation and heart problems from the shock, according to a relative of the woman.
Fire on South 3rd Street, Brooklyn @News12BK pic.twitter.com/SvE37djPa0
— Rich Snaith (@richsnaith) November 30, 2015The tenants on the ground floor were displaced as well after where gallons water poured through the ceiling and the walls destroying everything they owned.
"There's nothing like your home," Elsie Rodriguez, 80, who's lived in her first-floor apartment for the past 48 years. She and her daughter who live together are now sleeping on her other daughter's couch in Queens.
"I couldn't sleep the first night," she said. "I was nervous."
Julie Santiago, 59, Rodriguez' daughter has shared the apartment with her mother for the past 20 years.
After the blaze she and her mother were offered shelter beds in the Bronx, but she works in Williamsburg as a nurse and didn't want to commute.
"I'm just trying to hold myself together, to be strong," for her mother's sake, Santiago said. "This is her whole life, every little thing, she starts crying."
The two didn't have renters insurance, and had just saved up to buy new mattresses, a recliner, and sofas, all of which had to be trashed because of the water damage. Now they're crashing with Santiago's sister in her tiny Queens apartment on her couch, they sad.
"I don't know where to go right now," Santiago said. "I'm really lost."
The building's manager, who declined to give his name, said they were doing their best to restore the apartments to a livable condition, but did not have any time frame for how long repairs might take.
“It's a process, you know," he said.
"There's a lot involved and were doing our best," he said, adding that heat and hot water were restored to the rest of the tenants within a day. "The cleaning is underway."
The residents who lived in the second floor apartment where the fire began couldn't be reached for comment.
