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Fire destroys Mount Prospect apartment

Residents of a three-story apartment building in Mount Prospect escaped unharmed when a fire early Saturday destroyed a building in the Colonial Green complex.

“When we got there it (fire) was through the roof,” Mount Prospect Fire Chief John J. Malcolm said of the 3:30 a.m. Saturday blaze. The cause of the fire at 2024 W. Algonquin Road is under investigation, and “investigators are looking into what role, if any, the significant weather may have played.”

Malcolm said firefighters en route to the call were hampered by roads that were blocked by standing water from the record-breaking rainfall, forcing them to take an alternate route to the site. In addition, he said, neighboring departments that would have helped Mount Prospect firefighters were unavailable due to emergency calls in their own towns.

Initial attempts to extinguish the fire from the inside were called off as the flames “consumed the entire attic and part of the third floor of the 39-unit structure,” fire reports said.

Mount Prospect Human Services and the Red Cross relocated the building’s 75 residents to temporary housing. Calls to apartment management were not returned Saturday afternoon.

  A fire displaced residents at the Colonial Green Apartments in Mount Prospect. Rick West/rwest@dailyherald.com
  Samir Maya, 9, looks at his apartment building after he and his family escaped an overnight fire at the Colonial Green Apartments in Mount Prospect. Samir, his brother Edgar, 13, and their parents live on the bottom floor and were unhurt. Rick West/rwest@dailyherald.com