Residents pick up the pieces after fire

At height of storm, a fire on Shore Road

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Runnie Myles returned to his apartment at 210 Shore Road on Monday night in the hope of salvaging any belongings — family photos, books and other irreplaceable items — that he hoped weren’t destroyed.

Just two nights earlier, he had been awakened by a steady drip of black, fetid water from his ceiling after he dozed off while working on his laptop. “I looked up and saw water dripping out of my ceiling like a shower — it was raining down this black water,” Myles, 37, who grew up on the second floor of the six-story, ocean-front building, recounted. “I looked up and stuff was pouring through the electrical units, the lights and stuff like that.”

The smell, “not of smoke, but fire,” Myles said, and the severe snowstorm that night only added to the sense of alarm.

Not sure where the fire was coming from, he quickly woke up his grandmother, Delores Miller, a pastor at the Evangel Revival Community Church in Long Beach, and told her they had to get out.

“When I woke up I heard the noise — it was the alarm in the building but I thought it was the TV,” he said. “When that water was falling on me I knew something was wrong, and I could hear [firefighters] banging on my neighbor’s apartment, and they knocked on my door and they said, ‘You guys have to get out of the apartment.’” When he found out that the fire wasn’t in their apartment, he knew it was the one upstairs.

Myles and Miller were among the hundreds of residents who were evacuated from the 97-unit building after midnight on Saturday.

“People were really scared and shaken up,” said one third-floor resident who declined to give his name. “I opened the door and the smoke was just pumping in.”

“I’m really grateful to be alive,” said another tenant.

Long Beach firefighters and police rushed to the scene, where heavy smoke could be seen blowing throughout the building. Nearly 50 firefighters responded, with assistance from the Point Lookout-Lido, Island Park, Lawrence-Cedarhurst, Oceanside, Atlantic Beach Rescue, Baldwin, Inwood, East Rockaway and Rockville Centre fire departments.

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