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Crime & Safety

St. Louis Park Firefighters Help Put Out Minnetonka Blaze

The fire started around 1:40 a.m. Thursday.

Firefighters were busy Thursday morning putting out a two-alarm fire at a high rise condominium in Minnetonka. 

Crews were dispatched to the Cloud 9 Sky Flats, 5601 Smetana Drive, at around 1:40 a.m after receiving a call about a fire on the second floor of the building.

Nobody suffered any injuries, but people living on floors one through four had to evacuate.

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Firefighters from Minnetonka were joined by crews from Hopkins, Edina, St. Louis Park and Eden Prairie. When they first arrived, they saw heavy smoke coming from the second floor.

"We made entry and found a chair smoldering in the living room (of one of the units)," Minnetonka Fire Chief Joe Wallin said.

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Firefighters were able to extinguish the chair in a matter of minutes, but had to spend more than an hour extracting the smoke.

"It was an overstuffed upholstered chair, and they smolder more than they burn," Wallin said.

But the smoke was enough to cause some residents to panic.

"You just don't know what to grab, you know you have to go, so you just grab what you can and you get the hell out," said Amelia Meyer, who lives across the hall from where the fire started.

When the alarm sounded, Meyer and her husband grabbed their three dogs—and two purses—and made their way toward the door.

"As soon as we opened the door, it was just full of smoke," Meyer said. "So we just ran toward the stairs and got outside as soon as we could."

Meyer said she's thankful because things could have turned out much worse.

Meanwhile, Chief Wallin said the fire caused an estimated $10,000 in smoke-related damage to the room where it originated, the hallway, and an adjacent apartment.

Wallin added that the building's fire system prevented the damage from being more widespread.

"The smoke extraction system and the alarms all functioned as designed. It made our job much easier," he said. "High rise building fires can be very difficult, and this building's system worked very well."

The cause of the fire was still under investigation early Thursday morning.

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