Lynbrook couple extinguishes fire at neighbor's apartment

Theresa Erbacher was next door to her apartment at her mother’s on Feb. 17 when she heard a smoke detector alarm sounding off for about 15 minutes. As the alarm persisted, she investigated the sound and discovered that a fire broke out in an apartment on the third floor of the four-story building.

It was at about 1:30 p.m. when Erbacher went up to the third floor of the Windham House Apartments, at 200 Atlantic Ave., and saw the smoke billowing through the door of a one-bedroom apartment, which belongs to  Nancy Khan.

“I walked down the hall and was on the phone with my brother, and by the time I got to the woman’s door, the smoke was pouring out,” she recalled. “Big thick, black plumes of smoke were coming out of her door.”

Erbacher then asked her brother to call the Fire Department and ran downstairs and got her husband, James Erbacher, and told him about the fire. She also had her mom vacate her apartment because it was directly below Khan’s, and smoke was coming into it from the above floor. Jason and Theresa then went up to the third floor, and Jason said he went to put his hand on the doorknob to see if it was hot, but unexpectedly, it opened because it was unlocked.

“That apartment was so thick with smoke,” Jason recounted. “I had to run downstairs and grab a flashlight and that flashlight didn’t help me much. I saw a fire in the kitchen, a lot of smoke, so I filled a tub with water in the bathroom ran back and put the fire out.”

Theresa started screaming for Khan because they thought she was home. “My wife was calling for her,” Jason said. “We thought she was still in there. She’s older. We were afraid because the smoke was that thick that it could have overwhelmed her very easily.”

Luckily, Khan was not home at the time, and didn’t return until several hours later. Jason was able to extinguish the blaze after using buckets of water from the tub, and the Lynbrook Fire Department was quickly on the scene.

The cause of the fire and Khan’s whereabouts during it were not known at press time.

“It’s just scary that that type of fire was going,” Theresa said. “Her floor tiles in the kitchen were on fire. It was in the middle of the day, she had a working smoke alarm. She wasn’t home. Her door was not locked all the way,. If those couple of things didn’t happen the way they did, it could have been a lot worse.”