By Eric Francis

2/26/25

WILDER - Eleven residents, including three young children, were left homeless Tuesday morning after an intense fire broke out inside one of the seven condominium buildings that make up the Oak Knoll complex off Colonial Drive.

Shouts of “Call 911!” and frantic pounding on doors and windows rousted people from their sleep after a couple and their son woke up to find flames and thick smoke rapidly spreading inside their apartment in the center section of the second floor of the 8-unit building.

Justin Courchine, who lived with his wife and their one and six-year-old children on the ground floor directly below the apartment where the fire broke out, recalled being awoken by loud noises and his son Jackson saying that someone was banging on the door.  “I looked out and one of the girls that lives up there was yelling 'Fire! Fire! Get out of the house!’ and she was just covered in black soot, and so we all ran out of the house.  I can’t get the noise out of my ears,” Courchine said hours later.

Hartford firefighters struck a first alarm at 6:21 a.m. and Chief Scott Cooney ordered a second alarm after hearing reports that heavy fire was billowing from both the front and the back sides of the structure, with concerns that some residents might still be trapped inside.

The fire at Wilder’s Oak Knoll condominiums wound up displacing 11 residents of nearby apartments. All photos © Eric Francis.

Courchine’s next door neighbor, Stephen Smith, who uses a walker to get around, said he was stunned by the size of the flames once he got outside to take a look.  “I’m an early riser, so  I was up watching the news and I could hear people pounding on glass all around my apartment and I’m thinking ‘What is going on here?  It’s 6:15 in the morning.’ And so I went over to the door and there was a cop there and he said ‘You gotta get out. Your building is on fire!’ I immediately came out and saw the flames and I was like, ‘Holy Smoke,’ pun intended,” Smith said.  “Probably the flames were 20 to 30 feet above the roof. It was huge. When I first saw it I thought, ‘Oh my god, we are going to lose the whole building’—but it improved as soon as the first fire truck got here.  They were very quick about getting water on the roof portion and they knocked down the really big flames.”

Hartford police officers were among the first to arrive and began running from apartment to apartment, eventually confirming that everyone had managed to escape the building uninjured.

Sophia Wirak, a watercolor artist who just moved from the West Windsor area to her new apartment in Oak Knoll earlier this month was woken up by someone yelling “911!” and then neighbors and firefighters knocking.  “I ran out with just my coat and my rain boots and my purse,” Wirak recalled as she helped to wrangle some dogs that had been evacuated from a neighboring apartment.  Her own apartment sustained some damage, but Wirak expressed relief that she hadn’t moved any of her artwork into her new residence yet.

Neighbors rushed to help Jane the dog after she was rescued from one of the apartments.

Firefighters from Hartford, Hanover, Lebanon, Norwich and Windsor spent several hours dousing hotspots and overhauling the apartment where the fire began before three state investigators entered and began digging through the charred space looking for clues.

Vermont State Police Detective Sgt. Chris Blaise said that the fire marshals were “de-layering” the wreckage and “moving from the least burnt to the most burnt” trying to find where the fire began.

Speaking at the scene mid-afternoon, at the conclusion of that effort, Blaise said, “We have found that the fire started in the master bedroom,” where he noted that the occupants reported seeing “fire in the area of a desk and a lamp”—but they had fled the residence.

Blaise reported that fire marshals had sifted through that part of the apartment, but “there was enough destruction in the area that we cannot definitively link it to what caused to the fire.”

The detective concluded, “Although the cause of fire is going to remain undetermined, we will be classifying it as accidental, since there’s nothing suspicious based on the information we received from the tenants and the information we found while digging [through] the scene.”

Hartford Deputy Chief Jason Czora confers with Hartford Chief Scott Cooney after the two alarm blaze was brought under control.

Hartford crews spent eight hours on the scene Tuesday before returning to their station. Chief Cooney said that “the apartment has considerable fire damage to it but the structure itself is sound and it can be rehabilitated.”

While some of the building’s residents were able to reoccupy their apartments Tuesday afternoon, four of the apartments are currently uninhabitable and the American Red Cross was on the scene helping to find temporary shelter for those 11 individuals.