One person was killed and another injured Tuesday afternoon after fire gutted a single-family home near Route 59 and 103rd Street on Naperville’s south side.
Firefighters arrived about 3:15 p.m. to find the single-family house in the 3500 block of Redwing Court fully engulfed and someone trapped on the second floor, a Naperville Fire Department news release said.
Crews tried to “darken down” the fire while additional firefighters used hose lines to knock down interior flames in an effort to get to the victim, but they “faced significant challenges accessing the second floor due to substantial fire damage, which had caused a collapse in the interior stairwell and multiple holes in the second floor,” the release said.
Efforts to execute an exterior rescue using ladders was hindered by heavy fire coming from nearly all second-floor windows, the release said.
No information on the deceased victim or the person taken to a local hospital for treatment was released. The fire’s cause remains under investigation.
Five people who lived in the home were displaced, the release said. Damage was estimated at more than $800,000, and the house deemed uninhabitable by staff from the city’s Transportation, Engineering and Development department.
Initially the fire department dispatched 10 pieces of equipment and 24 firefighters, including an incident commander and incident safety officer, but the call was upgraded and six more vehicles sent out due to extreme cold temperatures and the advanced level of the blaze, the release said.
The fire was finally extinguished about 4:35 p.m., the release said.
Naperville received assistance from the Aurora, Bolingbrook, Lisle-Woodridge, Fermi Lab, Oswego and Plainfield fire departments. Bolingbrook, Lockport, Plainfield, Romeoville and Warrenville fire departments provided station coverage.
