One person was badly hurt and a Chicago police officer was injured after a fire roared through an apartment building on the city's South Side Thursday, forcing residents to leap from windows to safety. According to Chicago fire officials, the fire was reported in the 6400 block of South Morgan in the city's Englewood neighborhood. Firefighters say that the fire impacted two different floors in the residence, forcing some residents to jump for safety from windows. Residents at the scene helped others escape from the building. "We saw smoke, came over and heard them," Keith Harris, one of the Good Samaritans, said. "When they went to the back I was in the front telling them to head out the windows."  

Working for village government, it's not unusual to wear more than one hat at work; that's what Kevin Flaugher has done for the past 25 years. Since 1984, he has been a member of the Maryville Fire Department and starting in 1996, he was appointed the building and zoning administrator for the village. His last day as fire chief was Wednesday. He will remain in the building department until Oct. 1. "My parents moved to Maryville two weeks before I was born," he recalled. Being a born and raised Maryvillian, Flaugher said his family lived only a couple of blocks from the firehouse and it was not uncommon for him to tail the ambulances on his bicycle to see where they went and find out what had happened.  

The Pope County Fire Protection District will soon have another set of skills to aid patients during emergencies. The department has a new program to train 10 volunteers to earn their Emergency Medical Response Certificate. It will allow them to administer first aid and stabilize patients in emergency situations. First responders say having firefighters certified to perform on-scene medical care could save a life. "We cover 374 square miles in Pope County. 51% of it is Shawnee National Forest. Especially with Covid-19, everyone's been trying to enjoy the outdoors and we've had a lot of rescue calls. Unfortunately, they may be a mile or two back in the woods, and this will allow our firefighters to be able to give medical treatment to these patients." said Joshua Light, Chief of Fire Dept.  

A vacant house fire spread to a home next door in East St. Louis, Illinois at about 12:00 a.m. Friday. The vacant home on North 22nd Street was fully engulfed in flames when firefighters arrived at the scene. East St. Louis Assistant Fire Chief George McClellan said the flames from the vacant house caught the home next door's electrical meter on fire. Then the fire spread to the home's wiring. There was also water damage from efforts to put out the fire. No one was injured.  

A special GoFundMe has been established to help purchase a new LUCAS machine for Prairietown Volunteer Fire Department. The funds raised from the present GoFundMe will be combined with a special donation by Randy Luttrell, who credits the device and quick response of the fire department for saving his life. Randy Luttrell's story started on March 31, 2021, when he woke up not feeling well. He said 911 was called to his residence and a very short time after, the Prairietown Volunteer Fire Department arrived on the scene. Randy collapsed due to a massive heart attack in his Left Anterior Descending Artery; with a 100 percent occlusion to the artery (commonly called the "Widow Maker."). This type of heart attack has a 6 percent survival rate outside of the hospital setting when witnessed and CPR is administered right away.  

State and local fire safety experts hope a new smoke detector design along with a new law will help prevent residential fires. Normal Fire Department along with State Fire Marshals, Illinois Fire Safety Alliance (IFSA) and Illinois State University are encouraging residents to trade in their removable battery smoke alarms with a 10-year sealed battery smoke and fire detector. "People take the batteries out to use them for other devices and forget to put them back in," Margaret Vaughn of IFSA said. "When a fire occurs, its the smoke inhalation that's killing the people, not so much the burns," she added. In 2020, Illinois fire officials reported 107 residential fire deaths statewide and nearly 70% of those homes did not have a working smoke detector.  

VIDEOS: A house exploded in New Jersey Thursday morning just hours after it was evacuated due to flood waters from Ida, and a person who was traveling in the vicinity was injured by the blast. It happened around 5:44 a.m. on River Road near Whittier Street in Rahway. Several residents posted on social media that they heard or felt the explosion, which was caught on Ring video from a nearby home. Police say the residents of the home evacuated around 1 a.m. due to heavy flooding, and at some point between then and the explosion, gas was discharged into the house. The blast leveled the house and damaged several nearby homes. One man who was driving by at the time of the explosion suffered minor injuries and was being treated at a local hospital. Rahway Police, Rahway Fire Department and Elizabethtown Gas responded to the scene.  

PHOTOS: This is wrong, Michael Arad thought. It was 2003. Arad was 34, a few years removed from graduate school and working as an architect for New York City's housing department when the call went out for designs for a memorial at ground zero. An open competition would produce a winning design. Architect Daniel Libeskind the designer of the Freedom Tower, had charge of the master plan for the site and had set the design guidelines for the memorial. But Arad bristled at the lines Libeskind had drawn, the lines the designs were expected to stay inside. Libeskind wanted the entire 8-acre site to be 60 feet below street level, an enormous pit in the middle of the city, Arad calls it. The young architect was convinced it was the wrong way to go.  

Clemson recruited Noah DeHond to play football in 2017. The Rochester, New York native played on the offensive line. He was redshirted his freshman year before suffering a neck injury in 2018. He never got a chance to play in a game. "I have no regrets about my time with the football team," DeHond said. "I gave it everything I had, and I left better than I came in." After retiring from football, DeHond decided to follow another dream. "I had my little Halloween fire outfit when I was a kid," he said. He is still at Clemson, but he's on a different team now. He traded his football helmet for a Clemson University firefighter helmet. "My freshman year, I drove by the fire station because it's right by my dorm. And I was like, ‘I wonder if I could do an internship there?'" he said.  

PHOTOS: Cairo's first fire engine, a 1936 Dodge fire truck, has found a new home at Grand Island's Stuhr Museum of the Prairie Pioneer. It was the first fire engine purchased by the Village of Cairo and belonged to the Cairo Volunteer Fire Department. "They have put a lot of work into restoring it and love it very much, and they're donating it here so we can share it with everybody," Stuhr Curator Kari Stofer said. The 1936 fire engine has long been a feature of Cairo community events, and served Cairo into the 2010s. The vehicle can now be seen at Stuhr's Steam Learning Center and Farm Machinery building. "We love to highlight other communities besides Grand Island, and something that's so striking is the fire truck," Stofer said. "We're really honored to be able to take care of it and share it with all of Hall County and Nebraska."  

Ask any 10 firefighters to name the best movie about their profession and I'll bet seven or eight immediately would cite the Chicago-set "Backdraft," which to this day sets the bar for the most impressive staging of raging, roaring, realistic fires, accomplished primarily through practical effects on controlled sets, with the addition of some spectacular blending of visual effects courtesy of Industrial Light & Magic. Ron Howard's admittedly sentimental and sometimes bloated love letter to the heroes who run into burning buildings traffics heavily in cliches about Chicago firefighters and in particular those of Irish-American descent, and the melodrama often gets soapy — but every time there's a fire in a warehouse or an apartment building or an old auditorium or a private home, we can practically feel the heat and smell the smoke as the flames lick the walls and roar all around.