Lompoc firefighters extinguish flames inside apartment building

The Lompoc Fire Department responded to a structure fire inside an apartment Thursday evening.

The fire broke out just before 9:00 p.m. on the 100 block of East Hickory Avenue in Lompoc.

“You know I don’t care who you are, you don’t deserve this,” next-door neighbor Mark Bocock said.

Mark Bocock lives right next door to where these apartments caught fire Thursday night.

“It was very frightening because the back door of this house and that window right there aren’t very far apart,” Bocock said. “I could see the flames in the apartment in the window and it was blazing already, it was going really really good.”

Bocock jumped into action.

“I grabbed our fire extinguisher..went over to try to help and by the time I got there, our little fire extinguisher wasn’t going to do any good,” Bocock said.

He was touched by what he saw the upstair neighbors do next.

“They ran downstairs, were beating on the door yelling at them and making sure they got out, got out safely,” Bocock said.

Firefighters say it started in the kitchen of the upstairs unit.

“You couldn’t even see the street it was so bad,” Bocock said.

Investigators say the smoke alarms in the upstairs apartment weren’t working and that if they were sleeping, someone could’ve died.

“There’s some lessons to be learned here and I hope we learn them,” Bocock said.

Crews on scene reported a working fire with flames spewing out from the windows of the upstairs apartment.

The Lompoc Firefighters Association posted live video from the scene on their Facebook account .

Crews managed to extinguish the flames within a few minutes. The fire was contained to the single upstairs apartment.

The residents were able to escape the apartment on their own before fire crews arrived. No one was injured in the blaze.

The Red Cross provided assistance to the displaced tenants.

Total damage is estimated to be $60,000 to the property and $10,000 in its contents.

The cause of the fire is under investigation but officials say the fire began in the kitchen area.

There were smoke alarms in the home, but Lompoc Fire Department said they were not working properly.