Home damaged, garage destroyed in Belleville fire

Belleville firefighters were busy Monday morning,, responding to two structure fires on the west end within 40 minutes.

According to Fire Chief Tom Pour, crews were dispatched at 5:50 a.m. to an address in the 200 block of North 42nd Street. An attached garage was fully engulfed in flames.

Fire reached the breezeway that connects the garage to the home, but firefighters halted its progress. The home sustained only some heat damage and no one was reported injured.

The garage, however, was a total loss. So was the car parked inside it. A second car outside the garage also was damaged.

Pour said a preliminary examination of the scene by firefighters indicates a possible cause of the fire was improper disposal of fireworks, though investigators hadn’t yet arrived to begin their formal survey of the damage.

That’s because the investigators remained at the scene of an earlier fire.

Pour said firefighters were summoned to an apartment house in the 9600 block of West Main Street at 5:10 a.m. Firefighters arrived to find heavy fire in the kitchen of one of the ground floor units.

The blaze was quickly doused, Pour said, but the kitchen sustained heavy fire damage and the rest of the apartment unit was damaged by smoke.

He said cooking has been ruled out as a cause of the fire but had no other information as to a possible cause.

No one was injured in that fire but the apartment is not habitable, Pour said.

This story was originally published July 4, 2016 at 7:41 AM with the headline "Home damaged, garage destroyed in Belleville fire."