Livingston Firefighters Help Combat Luxury Apartment Blaze (VIDEOS)

ESSEX COUNTY, NJ — A massive fire destroyed part of an unoccupied luxury apartment complex in Maplewood last weekend, summoning more than 100 firefighters from across Essex County to the scene to combat the blaze, including a crew from Livingston, reports say.

The six-alarm fire took place around 1:30 a.m. on Saturday at the under-construction, 235-unit Avalon apartments on Boyden Avenue, leaving a large section of the building in rubble. More than 120 firefighters were on scene battling the blaze at its peak; one firefighter suffered injury after slipping on a patch of ice, NJ.com reported.

Responding companies included firefighters from South Orange, Millburn, Montclair, Bloomfield, Union, Jersey City, West Orange, East Orange, Livingston, Fairfield, Nutley and Belleville.

“Due to a lot of hard work and tremendous effort by firefighters, we were able to stop the fire before it got into the completed section," Maplewood Fire Chief Michael Dingelstedt stated on Saturday.

The cause of the fire is under investigation, authorities said.

The Virginia-based AvalonBay company has also redeveloped sites in Edgewater, Lyndhurst, Hackensack, Wood-Ridge, Bloomingdale, Teaneck and North Bergen. It owns 285 communities containing more than 83,000 apartments in the Northeast, Pacific Northwest and California markets.

Unlicensed maintenance workers armed with a blowtorch accidentally sparked a five-alarm fire at the company’s Edgewater complex in 2015, leaving about 500 people homeless, NorthJersey.com reported.

During a Saturday press conference, Maplewood Mayor Victor DeLuca said that officials inspected the Maplewood apartments a week prior to the fire.

DeLuca and Dingelstedt said that the Maplewood Avalon project was built using a higher fire safety standard than the Edgewater property, including more sprinklers.

AvalonBay stated that it’s working with authorities to investigate the fire and thanked emergency responders at the scene for their help.

Main Photo: YouTube, Jeff Stang