Seven Boston University students were hospitalized early Sunday morning after a two-alarm fire tore through their Allston apartment, Boston Fire Department officials said.
Two students jumped from the house at 84 Linden St.’s second floor, said Boston Fire Department spokesman Steve MacDonald, one of who, he said, was in critical condition at press time.
MacDonald categorized the 7 a.m. blaze as a “total loss,” and said although firefighters contained the fire relatively quickly, the house is beyond repair.
Due to “the heavy volume of the fire,” MacDonald said, investigators had not yet been able to determine the cause of the fire.
At about 9:30 a.m., firemen were still working to put out the flames, climbing around a hole punched in the wooden house’s roof and blasting specific sections with water.
Earlier that morning, “I heard someone yell ‘Help, help!’” said a neighbor who asked to remain anonymous, adding that the fire was so large “we decided to move out of this house […until] finally the firefighters came. The fire was in control in ten minutes.”
He took a video from the stoop of his own home, which looks directly into the burned apartment. In the clip, bright orange flames come from all the apartments’ windows and doors, nearly obscuring the entire left side of the house.
The video panned away from the house to show fire trucks lining the street, and he pointed to the image of a student lying on a snowy sidewalk.
About two hours after he took the video, smoke still puffed away from the house in deep gray drifts and firefighters with icicles hanging from their vests and hat brims walked back and forth just below it.
College of Arts and Sciences senior Spencer Goodman said the billowing fire jolted him awake.
“There were flames coming out at us,” he said, pointing to his room on the top floor of a house to the right of 84 Linden St., not 15 feet away from the singed apartment.
BU spokesman Colin Riley said he is grateful the students are recovering in what could have been a “terrible tragedy.”
“It’s just another reminder for people to use smoke detectors and take precautions,” Riley said. “It really was terrible news to hear that someone was injured this morning.”
Of about 60 firefighters to arrive on the scene, MacDonald said, only one was injured, hurting his shoulder.
The BU Police Department Supervisor, who was at the scene, could not be reached for comment.
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