LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) -- One person is dead and two others are in the hospital after a house fire in the Parkland neighborhood early Thursday morning.
During a news briefing, Louisville Fire Chief Brian O'Neill said the first call about the fire in the 700 block of S. 31st Street came in just before 7 a.m. Crews arrived about four minutes later, and "got to the rear of the structure where two victims had been pushed out of the home and were basically on the roof of a back porch."
Two people were rescued from the roof of a porch in the rear of the home.
Fire officials rescued rescued the victims from the back porch, and they were taken to UofL Health Hospital for treatment.
Crews searched the home while fighting the flames and "did find a third victim that, unfortunately ... is a fatality," O'Neill said.
He said a house near the boarded up home where the fire started suffered significant damage, and the Red Cross is working to find housing for the four occupants of that home.
It took 35 firefighters about 30 minutes to bring the fire under control, O'Neill said, but the fact that it was boarded up made the situation worse.
"So this is the issue when we have boarded up vacant houses that ended up occupied," O'Neill said. "You've got people that maybe are living there. They're trying to have fires for cooking, for heating."
Walter Jackson lives a few houses down from the vacant home.
"A tragedy at one house affects everybody else down the road here," Jackson said.
Jackson said in recent years this home has been a problem in their neighborhood, with trespassers coming and going in and out of it.
Louisville Metro Codes and Regulations has reboarded the property 23 times.
"We see people get out of vehicles and run up in there but there's nothing we can do about it," Jackson said.
Over the summer Louisville Metro created a Vacant and Abandoned Properties Pilot Program. The plan was to secure these vacant properties through ClearBoarding, which is placing plexiglass on these homes instead of plywood.
"Help us to identify these houses and we promise we'll get them secured and we'll do everything we can to keep them secured where people won't trespass and these fires won't happen because they're gonna happen as the weather gets cold," said Codes and Regulations director Richard Price.
Price said the city now plans to demolish the property.
The cause of the fire "is under investigation," O'Neill said, "but the larger issue is that if a fire does occur in one of these structures, it's going to get underway significantly before we are contacted, which means the risk for it spreading to the structures next door, which happened here."
This is the second fatal fire in Louisville in less than a week. On Tuesday, a man was pulled from a burning home in the Newburg neighborhood, but later died from his injuries at the hospital.
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