A terrified Hyde Park grandma raced out of her home with her baby granddaughter in her arms before flames spread to a four-alarm blaze that took dozens of firefighters to knock down this morning.
Maria Oliveira told the Herald she was feeding 15-month-old Nyah at 10 a.m. when bewildering alarms from the first floor rang out. She wasn’t sure what they were, but after a string of phone calls from Nyah’s mother, Natasha Oliveira, to the downstairs neighbor and back to the house, Maria Oliveira fled the two-family home, baby in arms.
“I called and said, ‘Get my daughter out of the house! Get my daughter out of the house!’ ” Natasha Oliveira said.
The desperate mother raced to the Austin Street home from work and saw black smoke erupting from the window of her childhood room as she drove onto the block.
“It’s shocking. It’s sad,” Natasha Oliveira said. “You see it on the news and you never imagine it could be you.”
In a stroke of luck, a fire crew working on an alarm box across the street from the house — which is in a residential neighborhood of single- and two-family homes — reported the fire and called in extra crews, fire officials said.
The first companies of engines and firefighters saw fire and heavy smoke billowing from the yellow house, and within a half hour the blaze had four alarms called on it — with more than a dozen trucks and about 90 firefighters attacking the fire in waves.
“They did a great job knocking it down and containing it to the building,” said Boston fire Commissioner Joseph Finn. “Extra manpower was to deal with the heat and make sure we limited the exposure time of our firefighters to the carcinogens that they’ve been exposed to for years.”
The fire ripped through both stories, the attic and the back porch of the home. Crews threaded a ladder through trees and electrical wires to “punch a hole” in the home’s roof and attack the fire from above, said deputy fire chief Jay Fleming.
Fire officials estimated the damage at $250,000 as they investigate the cause of the fire.
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