By Rosana Hughes, John Spink
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
ATLANTA — A woman and her baby were rescued from a burning apartment building in southwest Atlanta on Thursday morning, according to fire officials.
Atlanta fire Battalion Chief Derek Hullender said firefighters were called to the Abby Ridge Apartments on Martin Luther King Jr . Drive around 7 a.m. and found heavy flames coming from a vacant first-floor unit.
“There was a lot of fire,” Hullender said. “It did extend to the second floor, as well as into the attic.”
The woman and her child were in an adjacent apartment on the ground level, he said, but the fire had not yet reached that unit. They were uninjured.
The blaze was quickly extinguished, but six units were damaged, Hullender said. No other injuries were reported.
James Velasquez said he, his mother and sisters were asleep when they heard banging on the door.
“Out of nowhere, we heard that they were knocking on everybody’s door ... and said, ‘Get out! Get out! There’s a fire!’” he told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “We all just tried to get everybody out of the apartment.”
“It was just shocking what we saw,” Velasquez added.
Investigators are working to determine the cause of the fire, but Hullender said it started in the first-floor unit.
“There should have been smoke detectors in there, but there was no one to be alerted by it,” he said.
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