Trapped by Blaze, Woman Leaps 3 Stories to Safety

FERNDALE, MI – A Ferndale woman jumped three stories to escape a fire in her apartment complex during a frantic day for the city’s firefighters Sunday.

The woman, who suffered a broken leg, two broken ankles and smoke inhalation, leapt from her apartment in a six-unit building on Stratford about 8:30 p.m. Everyone else made it out of the building safely.

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Preliminary indications are that the fire started when the injured woman left something burning on her stove when she left for work in the morning, and returned to find her apartment engulfed in flames.

“She got trapped up there by the fire and had to jump out of a third-story window,” Ferndale Fire Chief Kevin Sullivan told The Daily Tribune.

The fire was the second firefighters battled Sunday. The first was reported at 3:17 p.m. by a neighbor who saw smoke coming from the back of the house in the 800 block of Channing.

Electricity from a downed DTE Energy power line five houses away traveled through a chain-link fence and up to an entrance gate connected to the aluminum-sided house where the fire broke out in the attic.

“This happens frequently, but most of the time the fences ground out” the electrical charge, Sullivan said.

The couple who live at the home were alerted by the neighbor who phoned in the fire tip and got out safely. Their house sustained an estimated $10,000 damage.