Two Firefighters Injured During 7-Hour Battle with Blaze

One Rye and one Harrison firefighter were injured during a seven-hour battle to knock out a fire at 4 Magnolia Pl. today.

EMS transported a Rye firefighter to the hospital after the roof collapsed on his legs around 12:30 p.m. today and he has been released, Rye Fire Chief Mike Taylor said today. EMS transported the Harrison firefighter, who suffered an ankle injury to the hospital around 2 p.m.

The cause of the fire is still under investigation but when firefighters arrived there was smoke and flames shooting out of the top story of the three-floor structure, Taylor said.

“It has been a long time that we have seen a fire of this magnitude in Rye,” he said.

The top floor of the home is completely gutted and the first floor has sustained heavy water and smoke damage. The Rye building inspector is still on the scene.

Two college-aged children were home at the time the fire started. They heard the smoke detector, heard popping and smelled the smoke and escaped before being trapped by the flames, Taylor said. The mother and father were not home at the time it started, he said. 

Firefighters from Rye, Port Chester, Harrison, the town and village of Mamaroneck, Greenwich, West Harrison, Purchase and Valhalla all responded to the call. About 75 men and woman worked all day to completely knock out the fire, which stubbornly kept burning inside walls and roofs all day long, firefighters said. 

“It was a good stop considering the heavy volume of fire that was going when they got there but we worked as hard as we could and we did the best we could to get the fire out and now its in the hands of insurance and the family,” Taylor said. “It is what they want to do with it.”

Firefighters are boarding up the house and packing up their apparatus right now, the chief said.

Rye resident Ted Carroll has alerted Patch that the home may have been the former mansion of historic Rye figure, John Motley Moorhead, who served as mayor of the city from 1925-1930.  

Taylor said he believes the home was Moorhead’s, but could not confirm.