What do you do when your life goes up in flames? For Greg Frost, that happened Sunday when his apartment complex caught fire.
"I was sitting on the couch watching TV, and I heard people screaming and yelling," he said. "I came out out on the porch and my next door neighbor's house was billowing with smoke. I panicked, grabbed the dog and ran out."
Frost lives in the Village Square Apartments in the Woodlands. His elderly next-door neighbor uses an oxygen tank. She was smoking a cigarette-- yes, smoking with an oxygen tank -- when the fire started.
Firemen had to pull her from the apartment because she did not want to leave her dog. While she made it out with burns on her arm and smoke inhalation, sadly, her dog died.
From her downstairs apartment, the fire quickly spread upstairs, turning that family's home to ashes. The flames raged so hot they burned the paint off a small child's bike on the patio. From there, the fire spread into the common attic the 12 affected units share.
Rodrigo Campos and his wife were downtown when they got a phone call telling them their complex was in flames. They rushed home to try and save their two cats. After the fire was out, firemen let Campos into his apartment where he found smoke-blackened walls and his cats, scared and smelling smoky, but otherwise, doing fine.
The apartment complex was able to relocate everyone to new units. The Red Cross was also on hand today to see that tenants' basic needs were covered.
"We lost pretty much all of our clothes, stuff like that-- our beds, furniture," said Frost, "but we'll be alright. We got out alive."
Some days, that's all you can ask for.
