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Three people are lucky to be alive after fire gutted their top-floor apartment of a Forest Hill home early Saturday morning.
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Toronto Fire Service arrived on scene just after 8:30 am to the three-alarm blaze at a home on Avenue Rd. just north of Upper Canada College.
The entire top floor of the home and rear rooftop deck were fully engulfed with flames and heavy black smoke. Smoke alarms alerted the residents to get out quickly.
Michael Villamor, along with his girlfriend Sal and friend Mike Lee, smashed out windows and crawled to the front of the home onto the steep rooftop and perched there waiting to be rescued by firefighters who arrived very quickly and put up ladders to them.
“It was just pitch black and I sort of got lost in it,” said Villamoor.
Villamoor thought he could put out the fire with an extinguisher, but quickly realized the gravity of the situation and opted to get himself, his girlfriend and their roommate out.
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“In the process of trying to get out my hair got singed,” he said at the scene on Saturday.
Lee, one of his roommates, said he’d just woken up and heard some kind of clicking sounds and thought it was his roommate using the “TV clicker because it is loud” in the living room and then the smoke alarm went off and Lee thought somebody was “cooking eggs or something.”
“After about 10 seconds I opened my room and there was black smoke, I couldn’t see,” Lee said. “There were flames and I couldn’t breathe.”
“It’s just a weird feeling, to be like, ‘if I don’t act now I could die today,’” he added. “We had no option and hoped our window would break, which it did, and climbed out onto the roof.”
The home, which is divided into several rental apartments, was evacuated over fears the fire would spread — but quick work by firefighters shut down the blaze…
Toronto Fire tweeted Saturday, “Excellent work by all crews involved.”
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The trio — all musicians who had been putting together a recording studio for the past two years — went back into their apartment to rescue personal musical equipment including a keyboard, speakers and drum kit.
They have already set up a GoFundMe page — www.gofundme.com/f/donate-to-help-us-rebuild-our-life-from-the-fire — since they have lost a lot of their recording equipment.
— with files from Liz Braun