NEW HAVEN, Conn. (WTNH) — Investigators now believe a chimney started the fire at the Harbour Landing condominiums on Monday. The building will need to be torn down. Property management expects it to be demolished either Friday or Monday.
Many of the residents who lived in the building lost everything they had. Ray Sirry was one of them. However, crews boarding up the building found his cat, Mickey, who had been missing for more than 24 hours.
“He’s been with us for ten years and he’s always been lucky,” said Sirry. “We got him out of a shelter.”
Sirry has lived in the condo complex since the 1980s. On Wednesday crews checked the building for asbestos in preparation for its demolition. When going through the units they were able to give the families who had lived in nine of them a small part of what they’d lost.
“We had one individual who had a navy cross. We found that,” said Property Manager Ken Carney. “Other individuals had things like laptops and pictures of their grandparents.”
Thirteen of the units will need to be demolished. Residents got a letter asking them not to use their fireplaces as a precaution. They also met with the condo association, the fire department and insurance companies on Wednesday evening to talk about what will happen next.
“Right now we’ve got them at a hotel in Orange,” said Carney. “We are asking them to contact their own insurance companies and get a more permanent residence.”
Property management is helping residents find a new place to live. Many are now staying with family. Others are moving into vacant units in the complex. They are trying to come to terms with what happened.
“The biggest impact maybe was the destruction of family pictures of a lot of our children,” said Sirry.
The new building is expected to have sprinklers. The old one did not, since it was built in the 1980s when sprinklers were not a requirement.
