A kitchen fire damaged an apartment on West Middle Turnpike in Manchester early Sunday morning.
According to Manchester Fire Chief Robert Bycholski, a woman and her son were asleep in the living room in the downstairs unit. The woman awoke and saw heavy smoke.
She discovered a pan on fire on top of the stove in the kitchen. She tried to lift the pan off the stove and sustained serious burns to her hand. She dropped the pan and yelled for her son.
Bycholski said a 15-year-old female in the upstairs unit heard the scream and saw smoke and notified the other residents of the unit, who were able to vacate the residence safely.
A resident of the second floor apartment tried to enter the downstairs unit to possibly extinguish the fire but was driven back by excessive heat and smoke.
Firefighters, who responded to the scene at 4:30 a.m., were met with heavy smoke and flames coming from the rear window of the first floor unit.
Firefighters were able to knock the fire down just nine minutes later. The woman from the downstairs unit was treated on-scene for partial and full-thickness burns to her hands and fingers.
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The woman told fire officials that she had been using the stove top to fry chicken and that she thought the burners had been turned off. Bycholski said the fire was caused by hot grease that was left in the pan.
The Local Building Department declared the downstairs unit uninhabitable. The woman and her son are receiving assistance from the American Red Cross and the Manchester Human Services Department.
The upstairs unit, as well as other units in the building, were deemed habitable and re-occupied.
Bycholski notes that fires caused by unattended cooking remain a leading cause of home fires each year. Unattended cooking fires in Manchester have been the leading cause of home fires in three of the last five years.
