Fire leaves several Brandon residents displaced

BRANDON, Fla. — A fire at The Hamptons at Brandon Condominiums is leaving residents of nearly a dozen apartment units without a place to go home to.

Firefighters say no one was injured, but the building sustained significant damage.

No one has yet been able to go inside, including Sheila Jacobs, who was home when the fire began.

“I went in the kitchen, went back out of the kitchen, and I noticed some haze coming from the back window,” she said. “I went and looked out the back door and I saw that an apartment on the bottom was engulfed in flames.”

Soon after, she heard banging on the door and got her family out as quickly as she could.

Jacobs’ neighbor, Pamela Beckley, was just pulling into the building when she noticed the smoke and flames.

“I started screaming at the top of my lungs, ‘everybody needs to get out. There’s a fire, there’s a fire. Everybody evacuate now,’” she said.

As Jacobs and Beckley waited for firefighters to arrive, the fire quickly spread throughout the building.

“We got everybody out because, within a matter of two minutes of everybody being over here, that entire thing just went up in flames,” said Beckley. “It just started to reach across as we stood here and watched when the fire department started to pull up at that time, about that time it hit the tree and we knew it was going out of control.”

Rob Herrin with Hillsborough County Fire Rescue says they are still investigating the cause of the fire and hope to have additional information on Monday.

For now, those affected say the Red Cross is in contact, but the loss of almost everything they have is overwhelming.

“I am glad that my family got to safety but I mean we did lose pretty much everything,” Jacobs said. “As of now, we don’t know what to expect if they let us in to get anything or see what’s salvageable.”