JAY – Four families escaped injury early Monday after a fire gutted two bedrooms in one of four apartments in an L-shaped building at 409 Old Jay Hill Road, Jay Fire Rescue Chief Scott Shink said.

More than a dozen people who lived at the North Jay apartment complex, which is set up like condominiums, were displaced temporarily after a fire was started by an unattended candle, Shink said.

Hard-wired smoke alarms alerted a family of four, including April Steele and her teenage son Teddy Gagnon, that there was a fire upstairs in Gagnon’s bedroom, Shink said.

Gagnon was downstairs watching television when the blaze was reported at 12:30 a.m.

The first report firefighters heard indicated that someone was still in the building on the second floor, Shink said. Firefighters made an aggressive attack inside to fight the fire and didn’t find anyone, Shink said.

More than 40 firefighters and nine trucks from Jay, Livermore Falls, East Dixfield and Wilton responded to the scene, with Livermore Fire Department on standby at Jay’s Chisholm station and Farmington Fire Rescue Rapid Intervention Team on standby at the scene.

Firefighters were on site six minutes after the fire report, Shink said, and were able to contain the fire to the two upstairs bedrooms in the first unit and the attic.

Three Jay firefighters had to travel by the apartment building, a former boarding house, to the North Jay fire station to get trucks. People were outside and firefighters could see the orange glow upstairs in the bedroom. By the time they quickly returned to the scene, flames were showing from three windows on the second floor and out an attic window, Shink said.

The post and beam constructed building, estimated to be about 130 years old, is owned by Arthur Leavitt of Jay, Shink said.

It took firefighters about 40 minutes to get the fire under control.

Firefighters put salvage covers over items in the apartments as other firefighters fought the blaze.

There are two apartments on one side of the building and two on the other side.

The apartment where the fire started was gutted upstairs and had water and smoke damage downstairs, Shink said.

The apartment next to it had substantial smoke and water damage, he said. The third and fourth apartments on the opposite side of the building had smoke damage, he said.

American Red Cross representatives were able to find temporary housing for a few days for the tenants, Arthur Leavitt said.

“Thank God everybody got out safely,” Leavitt said.

Leavitt and his wife, Michelle, were working with the tenants and social service agencies to get the people back into their apartments as quickly as possible or find temporary housing.

“They’re all good tenants,” he said.

Leavitt praised firefighters for their quick work in extinguishing the blaze.

“The fire departments did an absolutely magnificent job,” Leavitt said. “They knocked that fire down quickly.”

Leavitt said he and his wife, who own a property management company, have been doing a lot of work on the building.

“Thank God for hard-wired smoke detectors,” he said.

They could replace a building, he said, but they wouldn’t be able to replace the people in it.