Naperville apartment fire causes $200,000 in damage

Given that it's a holiday weekend, Tedd and Stacie Steele just assumed the whiff of smoke they smelled in their apartment was from a nearby grill.

It wasn't overpowering. One minute it was there, the next it was gone.

About 45 minutes after they picked up the scent, though, Stacie Steele heard a commotion on the apartment balcony above theirs on the west side of Naperville. When she went to the sliding door, people gathered in the parking lot signaled for them to leave the apartment.

They stepped outside and saw flames shooting out of the building above them at 2511 Bordeaux Lane. That's when they grabbed their daughter and the dog and ran -- "no shoes or anything," Stacie Steele said.

Naperville firefighters said when they arrived at the apartment complex, flames already were on the exterior of the building and crawling up its sides.

"The fire was rapidly spreading to the roof," Battalion Chief Rich Polarek said.

Firefighters were evacuated from the building shortly before a chimney collapsed inside the apartment where the fire started. Polarek said it appears it began after residents "discarded smoking material" on the deck.

No one was home at the time of the fire. While Polarek said firefighters believed a cat in the apartment perished in the blaze, Steele said another resident thought they saw the cat run away through an open door.

With no renters' insurance, the Steele family was moving what few belongings they could salvage from their water-logged apartment into another unit in the complex.

"The ceiling was collapsing as we were moving out my husband's books," she said.

Polarek said no one was injured in the fire that destroyed the two apartments. Damage was estimated at $200,000.