No Injuries in Early-Morning Cooking Fire

Firefighters from the responded to a second-floor apartment home early Friday morning, extinguishing a cooking fire.

According to Assistant Fire Chief John Connaughton, the call came in around 1:03 a.m., with trucks arriving at the residence at 1010 Henrietta three minutes later.

The home is a duplex, he said, with the fire originating in the second-floor apartment's kitchen. According to Connaughton, the renter was cooking something on the stove when she fell asleep. Cooking oil ignited, he said, and the fire spread from the back wall to the cabinets.

No injuries were reported from residents of either apartments, and Fire Chief Michael Metz noted there was limited smoke damage throughout the building. By closing the door to the kitchen, Connaughton said the resident was able to confine the fire to the kichen.

"It was pretty easy to contain," Connaughton said. "It really held the fire in check and made it easy to extinguish."

For the firefighters of the Birmingham Firefighters Association Local 911, the run illustrated one of their points of pride: a quick response time.

"That's the rapid response time (two minutes or less) of the (Birmingham Fire Department) that serves residents so well," a post on the group's Facebook page read Friday morning. "If we weren't there so quickly, the fire would have spread throughout the home in less than five minutes and the damage would have been far greater."

Connaughton said the resident renting the unit had to spend the night somewhere else after the fire.