A 19-year-old University student was in critical condition at a Portland hospital Wednesday night after being rescued from his burning campus-area apartment early that morning.
Firefighters pulled John Huddleston through a window of his ground-floor apartment on East 18th Avenue and resuscitated him shortly after 4:09 a.m. Huddleston was then transported to Sacred Heart Medical Center by ambulance before being moved to Legacy Emmanuel Hospital in Portland by helicopter.
The blaze left six other students homeless after it spread upstairs and into the building’s attic, blackening the front of the two-story complex and leaving the inside of several apartments coated in gray ash. Piles of burnt clothing and a destroyed mattress lay outside Wednesday afternoon next to a car warped by the fire’s heat.
No one else was injured in the blaze, said Glen Potter, spokesman for the Eugene Fire Department.
He estimated damage to the building at $200,000.
The blaze started when a smoldering cigarette left on a green couch outside Huddleston’s apartment caught the couch on fire and flames spread inside, Potter said.
University senior Jason Beck, who lives in the apartment directly above Huddleston’s at 765 E. 18th Ave., woke up around 4 a.m. to people yelling, ‘Fire.’
“I looked out the window, and I just kind of saw this orange glow,” he said. “And at first I thought it was just my car was on fire, and I opened the door and I got hit by all this heat and smoke and I realized the building was on fire.”
Beck grabbed his cell phone, called 911, put on a jacket and ran from the blaze.
“At that point, the fire was just basically the first floor; it was just kind of coming out the first-floor windows,” he said. “It kind of like slowly started building up, and I was getting kind of worried it was going to just completely engulf my apartment, too.”
Then firefighters arrived.
Senior Andrew Scott, who lives across the alley from the apartments, watched as firefighters dragged Huddleston from his apartment and resuscitated him.
“He didn’t look like he was alive,” he said.
After Huddleston was rescued, firefighters quickly extinguished the fire, Scott said.
American Red Cross volunteers responded to the fire Wednesday morning. The organization is putting up some students in hotels until they find new apartments, spokeswoman Jenny Carrick said. Others received vouchers for clothing.
Beck, who said he doesn’t have renter’s insurance, returned Wednesday afternoon to survey the damage. He kicked at the melted plastic lining the doors of his 1989 BMW sedan that his father gave him a little more than a month ago.
He is staying at his father’s house in South Eugene but he hopes to use winter break to find another studio close to campus. He was able to retrieve his textbooks from the apartment after the fire but wasn’t able to go upstairs later in the day.
“I think the main concern was, you know, the fire damage to the floor and how sturdy it was,” he said. “That’s basically what the fire department said, too.”
Beck said there was “really no fire damage” in second-floor apartments, but firefighters knocked out walls, leaving damp drywall on the ground.
“In my apartment, like all the walls are coated with black. I don’t know if that’s from the smoke or from the ash,” he said.
Beck said he didn’t know Huddleston but thought Huddleston shared the two-bedroom apartment with a roommate.
Amy, a University sophomore and complex tenant who asked that her last name not be printed, said she has been friends with Huddleston for about five months.
The couch appeared outside his apartment about two weeks ago, she said.
Rob Bennett, owner of Bennett Management Company, said this was the first he’d heard of the couch. Generally, “the rental agreement does not allow for furniture outside,” he said. There is no “full-fledged on-site management,” and no one regularly checks for infractions.
“You hope people follow the rules,” he said. “As a management company, we visit the site from time to time.”
Although each unit had a working fire detector, Bennett said the building, like many low-rise buildings, had no external fire alarm.
Beck said he didn’t hear a fire alarm. Amy said she tested her smoke alarm about two weeks ago, but “it just didn’t activate or something.”
Bennett said it’s “going to be awhile” before students can move back, although they will be able to retrieve some items.
“There’s a tremendous amount of cleanup and demo work that has to occur before we can start building it back,” he said.
His company will try to help the displaced students find other apartments.
“We’re trying to help a little. I think people are generally, on a very basic level, basically on their own,” he said. “It’s an unintended and very difficult situation for everybody.”
