Fire investigators found a carelessly disposed cigarette the cause of a five-alarm fire that destroyed a wood-frame house in Allston in the early morning of Oct. 27, officials said.
Boston Fire Department spokesman Steve MacDonald said the fire at 62 to 64 Quint Ave. started on a couch on the front porch.
Investigators based the determination on interviews and evidence, including the study of burn patterns, he said.
“The cigarette was not properly extinguished,” MacDonald said.
Careless cigarette disposal is still a very common source of fires today, he said, and people need to be sure they properly extinguish cigarettes.
“You have to have a way of extinguishing it, and it’s not just throwing it on the ground and assuming it went out,” he said.
Five residents and one firefighter were taken to the hospital to be treated after the fire.
One woman who jumped from the third floor and ended up in critical condition on Oct. 27 had been upgraded, MacDonald said, although the last status report he received on those in the hospital was on Sunday.
The call for the fire came in at about 6:18 a.m. for 62 to 64 Quint Ave., a large two-and-a-half story house, MacDonald told the Free Press on Saturday.
The fire, which stirred a lot of 911 calls, was heavy upon arrival, he said.
“Heavy fire was showing on arrival and the first officer on scene ordered a second-alarm to bring more manpower to the scene,” he said.
One woman jumped from the third floor in the rear of the house as firefighters were putting a ladder up to the window, MacDonald said.
“She just couldn’t take it anymore because of the amount of smoke and fire so she had to get out of there,” he said.
MacDonald said the woman made a jump for the ladder, missed it and fell two stories, bouncing off of a small roof above the first-floor door and landing on top of a firefighter. She was in critical condition Saturday but is no longer in critical condition as of Monday.
The woman and the firefighter were taken to the hospital.
“In addition, we had a man jump from a second-floor window,” MacDonald said. “He landed on the ground and he was also taken to the hospital.”
About 100 firefighters were on scene as the fire grew to five alarms, and three more residents were taken to the hospital for smoke inhalation, he said.
None of the injuries from the incident was life-threatening, MacDonald said.
Firefighters were still on scene as of 12:18 p.m., MacDonald said.
On scene at about 1 p.m., Captain Mark O’Brien of the BFD said his team was conducting an assessment of the structural damage that had been done to the house.
The exact cause of the blaze was still unknown, he said.
O’Brien said multiple large beams within the house had been snapped, and the roof was almost entirely destroyed.
Water damage was also a factor in the structural assessment.
“The entire cellar is full of water right now,” O’Brien said. “It’s likely that this will be a total loss [for the residents].”
O’Brien also said the department was able to salvage electronic devices that belonged to the residents, specifically computers and cameras.
MacDonald said the estimated damage is $650,000.
Officials could not confirm whether the residents in the house were Boston University students.
Casey Bergerson, a resident of 18 Park Vale Ave., said she had been delivering rations to the firemen at the point when the blaze had come under control.
She said she overheard one victim tell a fireman that he was a student and that he had lost his passport.
Bergerson also said she was quite fearful of the circumstance early on, because her home is located just behind the scene of the fire.
“It could have been dangerous for the whole neighborhood,” Bergerson said. “It could have caught on to one of the nearby houses or even one of the trees … [but] the firemen did a very good job.”
Adam Rogers, a resident of Quint Street, said the fire played a large factor in the outcome of his day, though he did not know the residents.
“I heard the sirens at around 6:30 [a.m.],” Rogers said. “There were maybe 10 trucks total … five on Glenville, at least two ladder trucks outside the house, and a few more on Quint.”
The mayhem prevented Rogers from making it work in his typical fashion, as he was unable to move his car from Quint Street he said.
Andrew Maier, a student at the New England School of Photography and a resident of the perpendicular Glenville Avenue, said he had not been aware of the fire until he arrived at the scene around 1:15 p.m., but was in the area the night before.
“The street was pretty much all parties last night,” Maier said. “It’s mostly students living here.”
Chris Lisinski contributed to the reporting of this article.
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