Outside the damaged building on Friday at 6 p.m. Lee walking back up the building’s front stairs en route to her condo after the fire. Fellow displaced Donna Drive residents Raymond Davis, with his cat Beelzebub, affectionately known as Bubbe. “It was pitch black,” Carlena Lee said a s she recalled running down three flights of stairs Friday afternoon to escape the fire and smoke that had engulfed her Quinnipiac Meadows condo complex. “You can feel the smoke” in your nose and lungs, she said. “It was just so scary.” Lee and her children and grandchildren made it outside safely — while part of the building that her family has called home for the past five decades had been wrecked. As she reunited with her cat, Baby, outside the condo complex roughly three hours after the fire, Lee said with gratitude, “I don’t know how the fire department got here so fast” and put out the fire before even more damage could be done. Lee, a 57-year-old former Yale dining hall supervisor, lives in a third-floor condo at 40 Donna Drive in the Quinnipiac Meadows neighborhood. According to city Fire Chief Danny Coughlin and Battalion Chief Patrick Psarras, firefighters responded at around 1:57 p.m. to a call about a potential kitchen fire in a first-floor residential unit at 40 Donna Drive. Upon arrival, they found active fires in three units and people hanging out of windows in need of rescue. Coughlin said the department put up multiple ladders and rescued seven people from windows. He and Psarras said that one resident was hospitalized with injuries from the fire, and one firefighter suffered minor injuries. They also said a total of 33 residential units were affected by the blaze and have been ordered vacated, with the Red Cross and the city helping find temporary shelter for the displaced. The cause of the fire is still under investigation. At around 6 p.m. Friday, Lee said she was planning on spending the night at the Econo Lodge in West Haven. She walked from Ross/Woodward School, where many of the displaced residents had gathered, back over to her condo to retrieve her pajamas, a cane, an inhaler, and a change of clothing for the night. Fortunately, her unit appeared undamaged by the fire — though she paused in shock outside of a unit two doors down, where seemingly everything, including the walls and roof, had been destroyed. Lee said she was at home and playing a game on her phone — “Bingo,” she said with a smile — at the time of the fire. She heard the alarm go off in the building, and then saw the flood lights turn on. By the time she and her family members were running down the stairs, the building had filled with smoke. Raymond Davis, who lives in a second-floor condo at 40 Donna Drive, had just gotten home from work when he too heard the fire alarm and heard kids running in the hall. “I was rolling my eyes,” he said, and was about to chastise the kids for pulling the alarm — and then he saw them sprint out of the building, and he knew he had to get out too. He breathed a sigh of relief that he and his three cats — Beelzebub, Cleo, and Mathilda — all made it out OK, and that his condo too appeared to be undamaged by the fire. Lee back in her condo, retrieving some belongings for a night at the hotel. Battalion Chief Psarras on scene. A fire-wrecked, third-floor condo two doors down from Lee’s. The post 1 Injured, 7 Rescued After Condo Building Fire appeared first on New Haven Independent. ...read more read less