By Regina Medina and Stephanie Farr
The Philadelphia Daily News
PHILADELPHIA — Shirley Ortega was just about to hit the hay early yesterday morning when her Lawndale neighbor knocked feverishly on her door, begging to borrow a cell phone.
“‘The building is on fire’ is all she kept saying,” said Ortega, 32, who lives in the Austin Manor Apartments on Rising Sun Avenue near Tyson.” 'Everybody’s jumping out windows!’” the neighbor added with urgency.
Ortega rushed outside to see the other building in the complex engulfed in flames.
The 4:30 a.m., five-alarm fire left 21 people injured, including two firefighters, said Fire Commissioner Lloyd Ayers. Thirty-seven households were displaced because of the fire.
The building last night still stood, but with broken windows and blackened brick. The air still smelled of smoke.
Some of the survivors were injured when they jumped from the burning building. “The ladders were going up, but people kept jumping,” Ayers said. “Folks were jumping. They were in untenable situations and had to jump.”
Residents told fire officials “there was not a lot of time,” Ayers said. “This was a fast-moving fire.”
The cause of the fire was not immediately known.
In October 2001, the other building, where Ortega now lives, was engulfed in flames, displacing 75 people. A candle’s flame was the cause of that fire, officials said at the time.
Preliminary reports suggest there were as many as four jumpers including one child and a baby who was dropped from a window to people on the ground below.
Eyewitness accounts said many more people were trying to flee the building.
Anxious women in their 70s and 80s were waiting to jump in the rear where many seniors live while screaming children at windows in the front of the building tried to escape the flames and smoke, eyewitnesses said.
But their fellow residents soon sprang into action, trying to save as many people as possible from the fire.
“It was chaotic, but everyone helped one another,” said one 42-year-old resident, who didn’t want his name used. “It coulda been worse, but everyone reacted the right way.”
Ortega said: “We’re helping people get to safety. Babies with moms. Just leapin’ out the window.”
“It was horrible, it really was.”
Resident John Barnes, 24, his girlfriend and 2-year-old daughter jumped out of their apartment window, about a six-foot drop, he estimates. “A Good Samaritan” rushed to the family and helped Barnes to catch the child. The child remained calm during the ordeal, Barnes said.
Barnes was treated at Jeanes Hospital for a cut he received in the fall.
Three of the civilians injured remain in critical condition at Albert Einstein Medical Center.
One of the firefighters was burned inside the building while manning a hose for search and rescue, Ayers said. The fire commissioner declined to say how serious the burns were, but said he was stable at Temple University Hospital.
The second injured firefighter, a lieutenant directing fire-rescue vehicles on the scene, was hit by a civilian-driven car. Ayers said he didn’t know if the driver was speeding or simply distracted by the size of the blaze when he hit the lieutenant.
“There was so much fire it was sure to turn your head,” Ayers said.
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