About 150 people were evacuated from The Atrium apartment complex in Packard’s Corner in Allston Sunday night after a fire broke out just before 9:30 p.m., Boston Fire Department officials said.
BFD spokesman Steve MacDonald said that residents had to evacuate the building at 1079 Commonwealth Ave. due to large amounts of smoke that accumulated after a stove caused a fire in a third-floor apartment of the five-story building. There were no injuries in the one-alarm fire.
“The fire was put out pretty quickly,” MacDonald said. “The big problem is that it’s a very big building, and the fire filled [it] up with smoke.” BostonFire, the BFD Twitter account, tweeted that flames were contained to the kitchen of the apartment, but firemen had to use smoke ejectors to clear the heavy smoke out of the complex. The smoke on the upper levels cleared by 10:30 p.m., at which point fire officials started to allow residents back into their apartments.
The fire resulted in $30,000 worth of damage, but nobody was injured, MacDonald said. The property owners of The Atrium are giving the residents of the apartment a place to stay for the night while their kitchen is cleaned up.
Service was stopped on the MBTA Green Line for B trains until about 9:45 p.m., but trains began running again after that with a 15 to 20 minute delay, according to the MBTA website. College of Communication sophomore Grace Ngau, a resident of the Atrium, said the fire was “not a huge deal” and that “nothing really happened.”
Ngau said that the fire alarm goes off pretty often because of broken elevators, so she thought little of it initially.
“I went halfway downstairs, and some girl told me that someone just set off the fire alarm cooking, so my roommates and I went back,” Ngau said. “This is the fourth time it’s been off this semester, but we’ve never experienced a real fire until tonight.
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