Senior citizens leave homes after a bathroom light starts a small blaze.
By Donna M. Perry
Staff Writer

LIVERMORE FALLS – While others watched from outside, Charlotte Lindholm sat quietly looking out the window as firefighters brought out waste barrels full of insulation and dumped it on the lawn.

She had been getting ready for the day when she heard a “pop” in the bathroom ceiling light. She turned it off and left the bathroom, and soon, she said, part of the light dropped to the floor in a flash.

“It was on fire,” she said. She called for firefighters and left her second-floor unit at Livermore Falls Apartments at 166 Park St.

“The fire alarm was ringing all over the place,” Lindholm said.

She was going up to visit her daughter Amy Lindholm in Farmington Friday, but now she would be staying longer than she planned, she said.

Dorothy Hunt’s hands shook as she held a portable phone. She was seated outside in a chair in her housecoat watching firefighters work. The fire had given her and other senior citizens a scare.

Hunt and others were evacuated to the parking lot of the mostly elderly housing complex.

Hunt’s daughter Millie Brown had worked late and was half asleep when she heard the report of the fire on her police scanner. When the dispatcher said “first building on the left,” Brown said she jumped out of bed and went to the scene.

Other people who have relatives in the apartments also heard it and went to check on them.

“Mom was already out here when I arrived,” Brown said. “It was a relief to see her out.”

Hunt said she didn’t have any shoes on when police and firefighters came to her door. They helped her put them on even though she wanted to wear her slippers. Her “good friend” Jeanne LeBlond, who lives in another building at the complex, came over to comfort and sat by her side, she said.

Vicki Worth and Cory Morse, Community Emergency Services medics, were talking to the senior citizens and then heading in to the apartments returning with boxes of medicine.

Hunt is a diabetic and hadn’t had her insulin or her breakfast, she told them.

Firefighters and police worked quickly to evacuate the eight apartments in the one section. The complex is made up of several multiunit, two-story buildings.

Mahlon Pulsifer, another resident, watched from a distance.

“It’s quite a commotion,” he said.

Roberta Larrabee, who lives in the apartment next to the one where the fire started, sat in a vehicle with no shoes on. She and her sister Beverly Brice were making coffee in the kitchen while their husbands chatted in the living room until the firetruck went by the window.

“It was scary,” Larrabee said.

About 25 firefighters from Jay, Livermore and Livermore Falls responded to the report of smoke in an apartment. Fire was seen pouring from the eves and the roof area of the building. The fire spread into the attic, Livermore Falls Fire Chief Ken Jones said. Firefighters got into the attic, vented it and contained the fire to the bathroom and above it.

dperry@sunjournal.com

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