Fire destroys garage in Watertown apartment complex

Cassandra L. Schultz was just about to get ready for a shower Sunday night when she discovered her neighbor’s garage was engulfed in flames at the Mountaineer Estates apartments off Michigan Avenue.

Miss Schultz and her 4-year-old son, Aydin, quickly got their shoes on. She grabbed her keys and purse before hopping in her pickup truck and backing out of the driveway.

“We just got out,” she said, adding that “flames were just shooting out from the garage.”

Four other people in the next door apartment at 423C also safely escaped the fire that extensively damaged the garage, said Battalion Chief David M. Lachenauer. The walls of the garage were visibly charred.

A woman living in the apartment at 423C was baking cookies in her kitchen when she smelled smoke and discovered the fire when she opened her garage door, he said. The tenant called 911 at 7:29 p.m.

The cause was not known Sunday night.

“We got there pretty quickly and knocked it down pretty quickly,” the battalion chief said.

All of the city’s fire trucks were dispatched to the scene. In all, 15 city firefighters battled the fire, while Fort Drum fire department was also there.

Firefighters were able to extinguish the blaze in about 30 minutes, but they stayed at the scene for almost three hours.

Pockets of tenants from other apartments stood behind yellow caution tape while they watched firefighters battle the blaze.

None of the six tenants were going to be allowed to stay in their apartments Sunday night because of the smoke damage to their units.

“Mommy, we had a fire, didn’t we?” her son said while the two were getting back in the truck while she tried to figure out where they were going to stay in for the night. She hoped that her renters’s insurance would pay for it.

“I was just going to take a shower, unwind for the night and get ready for the week,” she said.

Fort Drum housing and the American Red Cross ended up finding all the tenants a place to stay for the night.