Shortly after opening the storefront office for business at 9 o’clock Wednesday morning, a strange glow in a second-floor window across the street caught the eye of an employee at Gadzinski Insurance on Pulaski Street.
“It looked like a very tall, bright candle inside,” she recalled Thursday morning. Her desk faces the street and when she looked up and saw the yellow light grow brighter and more intense, she realized she was looking at flames inside the apartment above the Western Union store.
As panic rose within, the employee, who asked not to be identified by name, said she ran out of her office and called down the street to the town highway crew working one block east.
In an instant, flames started to shoot from the upstairs window of the two-story building.