WILKES-BARRE - Travis Butler thought the flickering lights he saw outside his North Main Street home early Thursday morning were just a tow truck hauling away a car.
Fresh out of a shower, he yelled to his mother, Penny, to check out the situation.
She took only a step outside her front door shortly after 6 a.m. when she realized the yellow lights weren't from a tow truck. They were flames shooting from her neighbors' first-floor, front porch.
"It was big, but it wasn't massive," a distraught Penny Butler said late Thursday morning, as she and her neighbors sat across the street staring at the gutted and charred double-block home.
The flames quickly tore through the three-story building at 242-244 N. Main St. None of the building's six residents was injured, but it left them searching for a place to stay.
Flames also damaged part of 246 N. Main St., leaving nine King's College students without a home, according to a fire official. They were staying in a college dormitory.
Assistant Fire Chief and Inspector William Sharksnas said fire crews were dispatched to the building at 6:19 a.m. They encountered heavy flames at the building. The cause of the fire remains under investigation, Sharksnas said.
By noon Thursday, well-wishers brought pizza for the fire victims to eat for lunch.
Butler said that once she saw the flames, she hollered to her sons, ages 12 and 14, to get out the back door.
She grabbed the phone, called 911, and began knocking on the back door of 244, yelling, "Get out. Get out."
There, Chris Shaw had awakened at about 5:50 a.m. to use the bathroom. He noticed nothing out of the ordinary until a few minutes later when a firefighter who lives nearby pounded on Shaw's door.
"You gotta get out. Your house is on fire," Shaw recalled the firefighter saying
The 57-year-old Shaw darted to the third floor where his 87-year-old mother lives in an apartment. He managed to get her out, and his wife also made it out unscathed.
Butler was on her front porch at 5:30 a.m to get her newspaper. She saw nothing out of the ordinary. Her son, Travis, got in the shower at about 5:45 a.m., and it wasn't until he got out that the flames were noticed.
Sharksnas said the fire apparently got its start in wicker furniture on the porch.
Within three or four minutes of anyone noticing the flames, the fire was threatening the third floor, Shaw said.
