East Hillside Apartment Catches Fire Damaging Homes, Displacing Tenants

One resident went door to door helping people get out of their apartments safely.

DULUTH, Minn.- Duluth firefighters spent hours battling an apartment fire in Duluth’s East Hillside neighborhood late Saturday into Sunday, which left multiple units damaged, and tenants displaced.

At about 10:30 Saturday night, the apartment building on the 1100 Block of East 3rd Street caught on fire.

Multiple fire crews responded to the scene, where five cats from three different apartments were stuck. Fire crew members cut through the building’s roof to retrieve the cats and put out several hot spots.

“There are nine different units and so when crews arrived on scene they found the stairway to the exterior, right behind me, on fire,” said Duluth Public Information Officer Kate Van Daele. “They were able to see through a first and second-story window that there was not only smoke but there were flames.”

The majority of the residents were cleared from the building prior to fire crews arriving on the scene. One resident went door to door helping people get out of their apartments safely.

“Telling everybody kind of get out of the apartment and then—so I went around back where the fire was and just ran through the whole apartment, started knocking on doors,” said tenant Mitchell Carey.

Multiple units experienced smoke damage from the fire.

The owner of the complex spent Sunday morning trying to patch up the hole in the roof. He said four of the tenants could not return to their apartments.

“It was just a real tragic thing because it affects four different tenants and three of them are in a safe spot—the fourth one, we’re waiting for Red Cross to tell us what we can do,” said the owner of the complex Theodore Tucker.

The apartment complex blaze is the 93rd structure fire this year, making the number increasingly close to the 141 structure fires in 2020.

Shortly after 1 a.m. Sunday, fire crews were able to clear the scene without injury. The cause of the fire remains under investigation.