Freakish Pizzas Destroy Apartments

landlord helpA tenant in Connecticut burned down an entire apartment building last week in a freak cooking accident.
 
The 110-year-old building was razed when the first-floor apartment fire spread throughout the building. Twenty-six people were displaced.
The tenant was cooking a chicken in an aluminum oven pan.  When she tried to pull it out of the oven, the pan was too flimsy to support the weight of the bird, so she reached for a cardboard pizza box to stabilize it while it was still in the oven.  When the box caught fire, the tenant pulled the burning pan out of the oven, and made her way to the back porch of the unit.  There, she stomped out the fire, poured water on it, and then left the smoldering box unattended.  The back porch was soon ablaze, and the flames came into other units from the open windows above.
The tenant was hospitalized as a precaution.
The fire also caused some damage to a neighboring building.
In a related story, a Madison, Wisconsin landlord incurred $7,000 in damages when pizza boxes stacked on a stove top caught fire.  The tenant explained that someone must have accidentally turned on a burner.
The tenant ran to the bathroom with the burning boxes and submersed them in the bathtub.  He received minor burns.
Sprinklers all along the way from the kitchen to the bathroom were activated by the smoke.  Fortunately, the sprinklers extinguished the rest of the fire, but the unit suffered extensive damage from the smoke and water.
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