Woman killed, 3 injured as Bay Shore fire rips through 3 homes
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A woman was killed and three people were injured after a fire tore through three Bay Shore houses early Thursday, officials said.
The Bay Shore Fire Department was alerted about 1:27 a.m. to a fire on North Windsor Avenue, Chief John Ippolito Jr. said.
Firefighters found three houses ablaze and called 14 other fire departments to assist, he said.
Two of the three occupants in the house where the fire was heaviest managed to escape. One was taken to South Shore University Hospital in Bay Shore for evaluation, Ippolito said.
The third occupant, a woman, died in the blaze, Suffolk police said. Two firefighters suffered minor injuries and were treated at the scene. The woman's identity was not released, pending confirmation by the medical examiner's office, police said.
Three occupants of the second house — two adults and one child — escaped.
The third house was unoccupied and appeared to be boarded up, Ippolito said.
Firefighters, confronting high winds and severe cold, brought the blaze under control in about three hours, Ippolito said.
The first house collapsed, and the other two suffered heavy damage, he said.
Two fire trucks returned to the house around 9:30 a.m. to put out hot spots. A burned stove on top of debris was the only visible remnant of a household. Water ran through the rubble.
A once-black Mercedes-Benz parked in the driveway had turned the color of ash, its left side completely burned. The house that the family of three escaped from was scorched on its side.
Neighbor Teresa Nicolich said the flames were so bright that she and her husband thought someone was shining lights through their window.
Her husband "moved the curtains and saw that there was a fire behind us," she said.
The couple then went into their backyard and noticed that the winds were so strong, the fires’ embers were blowing into the neighboring yards, Nicolich said.
"It’s devastating," she said. "There’s not even a house there."
John Dunne, whose mother and sister live in an adjacent house, said a neighbor had seen the fire around 1:30 a.m. and banged on their door.
"Luckily, it woke my mom and my sister and her family up and they were able to get out," he said.
His family, Dunne said, is physically all right and got out before the fire consumed the house and are "as well as they can be when something like this happens."
Although he grew up in the house, Dunne said, he does not currently live there and did not know the occupants of the house that collapsed.
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