Two killed by fires in Camden, N.E. Phila.
Flames swept a vacant rowhouse and an apartment building, doing extensive damage. Officials were seeking the cause of both blazes.
Fires killed a woman in her 70s in Northeast Philadelphia and a drifter in his 50s in Camden just after the New Year was rung in.
Neither person was identified by officials and both fires caused severe property damage.
At the 51-unit Bradford Arms, the apartment house at Bustleton Avenue and Hoffnagle Street where the woman died, residents stood outside yesterday, hoping to get into their homes to recover belongings.
Vadim Gubov somberly recalled the previous night.
Just after popping champagne, he said, he heard a fire alarm, ran down the hall, and saw a plume of black smoke pouring from a neighbor's unit.
He gathered up his parents, wife, daughter and her boyfriend, and the family fled the three-story brick building.
Fire officials said two firefighters and handful of residents were injured. The Fire Department evacuated residents to the nearby Louis H. Farrell School, but Red Cross spokeswoman Denise Venuti Free said only two people accepted the offer of shelter; most others stayed with family or friends. Free said the Red Cross was giving victims financial assistance and working to relocate them. A nurse was helping victims replace lost medications.
Yesterday, the fire marshal and city Department of Licenses and Inspections were combing through the apartment house, trying to figure out how the fire started.
The building is an enclave of recent immigrants, many of whom speak Russian.
Gubov, a Ukrainian, said: "We just opened champagne. It was 12 o'clock. New Year's. After two or five minutes, we heard the fire alarm. I saw a woman open her door and saw black smoke."
As he described his family's evacuation, his wife, Irena, had tears flowing slowly from her eyes. Standing in yesterday's dry cold, the two were hoping to get into their unit to recover clothes and personal items so they could get on with their lives.
"In the apartment are my clothes. I have to go to my job," Irena Gubov said. She works selling subscriptions to a Russian magazine. Her husband is an electrical engineer who repairs automobile computers.
"I need my clothes. I need my shoes," she said, pointing to her sneakers.
There were tears in Mary Murphy's eyes as well. Murphy lives behind the apartment house, and while celebrating a quiet New Year's Eve with her family, she saw the smoke and went to watch it with her daughter, Megan, both afraid that flying embers could damage their home.
"To know I was watching this and somebody died," she said. The Murphys said that at one point the smoke was so thick they could barely see.
"I'm so sad," Murphy said. "This is not a great way to start the new year."
Fighting the four-alarm blaze in Philadelphia and the fire in Camden was made even more difficult by gusty wind yesterday morning.
Wind caused scattered power failures for about 50,000 Peco Energy Co. customers throughout the region on New Year's Eve and yesterday. Spokesman Michael Wood said service was quickly restored.
In Camden, fire ripped through a Browning Street rowhouse that apparently was occupied by squatters, Fire Marshal Ralph Roberts said. The two-alarm fire started in the first-floor living room and an unidentified man's body was found on the second floor, he said.
Neighboring houses sustained minor smoke and water damage, he said, adding that he was still investigating the cause of the fire. Residents had complained about squatters in the abandoned rowhouse.
