Two people were hospitalized Friday morning after an extra-alarm fire erupted in an Edgewater apartment building.
The fire at 5200 N. Sheridan Road started about 8:15 a.m. and began spreading, according to the fire department.
Ladders were raised to the sixth floor for several people at windows “looking to get out,” the department said on X, formerly known as Twitter.
Both injured people were taken to local hospitals in serious-to-critical condition, Deputy District Chief Kelly Burns said.
The resident of the sixth-floor unit where the fire started was in the lobby when firefighters arrived and was one of the people taken to the hospital, Burns said.
One woman was rescued from her fourth-floor window when she was threatening to jump.
Ali Buck, who lived just down the hall from where the fire started, was rescued and was taken to the hospital after she passed out in the hallway from the smoke.
Buck said she was sleeping when the fire started and did not wake up because no alarms were going off in her apartment or the hallway. She only found out because her neighbors and friends were calling her.
“I put my cat in his carrier and opened the door to a wall of black smoke. I got low and had one hand feeling for the wall so I could find the fire escape, one holding my phone as a flashlight with my cat’s carrier harnessed around me,” Buck said.
“I was calling out, ‘Help me, please, I’m here,’ and that’s the last I remember before waking up in the ambulance,” she said.
Buck had elevated carbon monoxide levels, suffered level one damage to her lungs and bruising from passing out.
She also said she hadn’t received any communication from Trigild, the management company, aside from a note they sent to all tenants.
Buck, who is a member of the tenants union, had been present in calls with management to negotiate updated safety plans and alarms for units and hallways. She said their requests were denied.
“I am definitely going to move,” Buck said. “I’m staying with a friend and couch surfing around. I don’t know if I can go back into that building. My cat died due to the smoke.”
“This was a tough fire,” Burns told reporters outside of the 230-unit building.
Burns said the fire was upgraded twice within five minutes of crews arriving on the scene. Fire and smoke from a window in the unit where the blaze started could be seen from seven blocks away.
Burns said building management had offered some of its more than 40 empty units to residents who had been displaced, so no tenants were displaced from the building.
Fire officials said the building wasn’t required to have sprinklers because of its age.
Several residents said they were alerted to the fire not through an alarm but through a tenants union group chat about 8:15 a.m. or by first responders banging on their doors.
“I didn’t hear a single fire alarm,” said Victor Mitchell, who has lived in the building for a year and a half. “It’s because of that group chat that we were able to evacuate. Without it, I would’ve gone back to sleep for 10 or 15 minutes.”
Sabrina Stark, who has lived in the building since May, said residents have “raised the concern about the fire alarms.”
“The police were the first way I heard about it,” Stark said.
Burns said the lobby alarm was going off but that he couldn’t speak to whether alarms sounded on individual floors.
The Edison Tenants Association, formed by multiple tenants of the building, said the building owners told them in November the alarm system worked properly.
“This is unacceptable,” the group said in a statement Friday. “We had two of our community members sent to the hospital today because they couldn’t clearly hear an alarm.”
The association demanded audible alarms, a functional safety and evacuation strategy for fires and an annual fire drill.
Building managers could not be reached for comment; listed phone numbers rang unanswered on Friday.
Residents were allowed back into the building about 10 a.m.
The cause of the fire is under investigation.
The building was cited earlier this year for 16 code violations related to elevator operation, including not having a working alarm bell in its freight elevator and or phones in passenger elevators, according to city records. Another citation was issued for failing to have three keys in the fire service key box.
City inspectors were also brought out in June to check out the condition of smoke detectors and reports of cockroaches, though an inspector couldn’t get access to the building, according to city records.
In 2021, when the building last passed an annual inspection, it had previously been cited for having obstructions in the stairwells near the seventh and eighth floors, city records show. Another citation was issued the next year because city officials weren’t able to inspect the stairwells.
The combination of past issues and the Friday morning fire left some tenants worrying about the future of the building’s residents.
“I worry there’ll be another event soon and lives will be lost,” said Nora Catalier, who has lived there for eight months.
