State authorities are still investigating what caused a fatal fire at an apartment building in Portland’s Munjoy Hill neighborhood.
Firefighters responded to the three-story, four-unit building at 43 St. Lawrence St. just after 2 a.m. Sunday.
The fire is still under investigation by the Office of the State Fire Marshal, Shannon Moss, a spokesperson for the Maine Department of Public Safety, said in an email Monday. Authorities have not released the identities of two people found dead in the building. Moss said their identities “will be positively determined during the autopsies.”
The apartment building was condemned after a city inspection on Monday, according to records provided by the city to the Press Herald.
The owner of the building had worked with city staff “about two years ago to install fire doors in each of the stairwells and update all of their smoke detectors,” Jessica Grondin, a spokesperson for the city, said in an email Monday.
The building’s owner said he was not available for comment Monday.
The street was quiet Monday afternoon, save for some tenants in white coveralls and protective respirators working to recover their belongings from the building. The tenants told the Press Herald they were not yet ready to talk about what had happened.
Steve Thomas, executive director of the Southern Maine Red Cross, said residents of the apartment who were displaced received immediate services, including financial and mental health support, from the organization.
Neighbors in the Munjoy Hill neighborhood described seeing flames and hearing sirens early Sunday morning.
Ananda Moor-Jankowski, 48, said she and her husband woke up around 2:45 a.m. to the sounds of sawing wood and fire trucks. She saw bright orange flames and billowing smoke coming from the building.
“It’s hard to put it into words,” Moor-Jankowski said. “It was almost like this speechless, frozen feeling of terror, like something bad is happening.”
She said they went outside and saw their neighbors also milling about to see what was going on, before returning to bed. When she got up later that morning, water was still flowing on the street, Moor-Jankowski said.
Brian Partridge, 41, said he went to his upstairs deck and saw red and blue lights illuminating the street. He said he was alarmed seeing the fire so close to his house, just a block over.
“Then it was worrying, like is it going to spread?” Partridge said, adding that “it was reassuring to see so many fire trucks out.”
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