An elderly man died in a house fire in Brentwood, Maryland early Sunday morning, according to Prince George's County Fire and EMS Department.
Firefighters responded to the 3400 block of Webster Street at 12:39 a.m. where they found the first floor of the duplex in flames.
“It was definitely scary,” said a neighbor. “We heard the banging. My daughters were upstairs. They came down and they thought it was our house.”
Crews from Prince George's County and Montgomery County responded to the fire. It was contained on the first floor of the brick duplex where the man was found dead.
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Later, crews were back in the Brentwood neighborhood for a routine debriefing.
They also walked the neighborhood, checking homes for smoke detectors and installing one for free if needed.
Crews worked around what Prince George's County Fire Acting Assistant Chief Donald Fletcher called "extreme hoarding conditions" to extinguish the fire.
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Firefighters weren’t completely surprised by the extreme conditions they encountered. There had been a there before and they responded and made note of those conditions and noted that there may be challenges if they ever had to respond there again.
“We can only operate within a one to two foot space with the fear of things falling down on top of us and blocking our exits as well.” Fletcher said. “As you can see, windows are blocked here. We use windows as points of entrance and points of egress.”
The city was aware of the conditions there, and the yard had actually been cleared. The debris there now came from inside the house — fuel for a fire.
“We ran outside and we saw the fire trucks come and try and break the door, but because it was so hard to break the door, it took them a couple of minutes,” the neighbor said.
There’s information departments want to get out about doors in general and the danger of double-key dead-bolts, where a key is needed to get in and to get out.
“In the case of a fire, you wake up, you’re already spun around, you can't really see,” Fletcher said. “The challenge of trying to get that key in the deadbolt just to get to your only point of egress really complicates the issue.”
The post-fire investigation will determine how much of a factor that could’ve been as well as the cause of the fire.
