No injuries were reported from a blaze that started in the kitchen of a home at 2801 Byron St. late Tuesday morning.
Lt. Harold Clark, spokesman for the Pine Bluff Fire and Emergency Services, said that the fire caused significant damage to the home where Patty Lee lived with her daughter and grandchildren. The blaze resulted from an incident involving home renovation work.
“They were renovating their whole kitchen area,” Clark said. “They had recently taken the cabinets off, restained them with varnish and then put them back on the wall. The cabinets fell off the wall and landed on the electric stove in the kitchen that had two burners going at the time. The varnish is highly flammable and so everything ignited.”
Clark said that Lee was the only one home at the time of the fire.
“She said that she was in her bedroom, heard a loud boom and the next thing she knew smoke filled the room,” Clark said. “She managed to escape through the bedroom window. The sound she heard turned out to be the cabinets falling off the wall.”
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
“The fire damage is mostly confined to the front part of the house but smoke damage occurred throughout the residence,” Clark said.
Clark said that the Red Cross was on scene to provide for the family’s needs.
Clark said that it took the four fire trucks on scene around 30 minutes to extinguish the blaze.
“Our personnel started extinguishing the fire as soon as they were on scene,” Clark said. “They went in to make sure that nobody else was inside.”
Clark said that Engine One, Engine Three, Engine Four, and Ladder One responded to the fire call that came in at 11:36 a.m.