VIDEO: A two-alarm fire at a Northeast Side apartment complex has displaced five people overnight, the San Antonio Fire Department said. The fire was called in just before 11:30 p.m. Friday at the Kenton Village Apartments in the 14600 block of Nacogdoches Road. Firefighters said when they arrived they found a building with four units fully-involved. Fire officials said the fire quickly spread throughout the building, with flames shooting through the roof, causing the chimney to collapse. Firefighters were able to contain the fire from spreading to other buildings, but one building is a total loss. Five people from three units were displaced by the fire. The fourth unit was vacant, firefighters said. Apartment management is now helping the people displaced by the fire. There were no reports of injuries.  

VIDEO: Houston firefighters spent about 45 minutes Saturday night rescuing a man who was stuck inside of a pipe on the roof of a business in the Gulfton area. A witness told KHOU 11 News that he was walking his dog around the building in the 6200 block of Evergreen Street when he heard someone yelling for help. The witness said he walked all around the building but couldn't find the person yelling. He eventually noticed the yelling was coming from the roof and when he climbed up, he found a man stuck in a pipe. The witness said the man told him someone was chasing him and trying to kill him. The witness called 911 and soon afterward, firefighters arrived on scene and used a rescue truck and a ladder truck to free the man from the pipe. It's unknown how long he was up there.  

Tommy Cones, League City's fire marshal, is among a growing number of residents who have contracted, endured and recovered from the coronavirus. He summarizes the two-week ordeal and its myriad debilitating symptoms succinctly. "It was pretty much like I was run over by a truck," Cones said. Cones, 60, said he first began to feel ill March 20 and initially thought he had a sinus infection. Over the next two days, Cones' wife began to show the same symptoms. Because sinus infections typically aren't contagious, Cones began to worry. Then, each of their conditions rapidly deteriorated, he said. By March 23, Cones knew something was very wrong. He started having difficulty breathing, was coughing a lot and experienced diarrhea, loss of appetite, fever, loss of taste and smell, bad back and knee pain and fatigue, he said.  

After years of planning and preparation, City Council unanimously adopted the Wildland-Urban Interface Code last Thursday. In addition to adopting the code, which focuses on regulating building codes to protect structures against wildfires, Council Member Alison Alter made a motion instructing the city manager to outline a separate stakeholder process addressing vegetation management and fuel mitigation strategies. That motion also passed unanimously. "This is not the complete package," Council Member Alter said of the WUI Code. She explained that vegetation management and fuel mitigation were also key to reducing the severity of wildfires. Alter represents District 10, which has the highest number of homes abutting wildland in the city, according to an analysis by the Austin Fire Department.  

Campers and RVs will temporarily be allowed to park outside of homes and driveways in the City of Lakeway during the coronavirus pandemic. The city temporarily changed its ordinance after code inspectors noticed a trend of several RVs parked outside of homes over recent weeks. It was discovered that first responders and medical workers were attempting to self-quarantine away from their families by staying in RVs. Even though workers in the medical field couldn't be with their family inside the home, they could still be close to their loved ones. "We saw this and thought this is a great happy medium. They can quote ‘go home' and they'll be in their driveway and see and interact from a distance," Lakeway Mayor Sandy Cox said. The City of Lakeway says it also has a block of hotel rooms ready to use for people who need to self-quarantine.  

Israel Tolentino Jr., known as "Izzy" to family and friends, was considered an everyday hero to his Passaic, New Jersey community. On his days off, the firefighter and dad of two served as an EMT and as a member of the volunteer community emergency response team, said Hector Lora, the mayor of Passaic. Last year, at the fire department's Christmas Toy Drive, Tolentino, Jr. volunteered to be Santa Claus, said his wife, Maria Vazquez. He sported a traditional red suit and white beard while cruising down the neighborhood streets on a motorcycle to hand out toys. On March 31, the 33-year-old firefighter died from complications due to the novel coronavirus, which has struck more than 557,000 people in the US, according to data from John Hopkins University.  

City advocates are urging the federal government to create a victims compensation fund for first responders on the frontlines of the coronavirus crisis, to protect their families should they die from the disease. "There has to be a 9/11-type fund set up now for them so that if they die from the virus, their families can be compensated," said Manhattan attorney Bob Sullivan, who wrote a letter to New York's federal lawmakers on Thursday. "They have to do it now rather than later." Advocates are also calling on the city to amend its rules so the families of first responders dying or suffering a coronavirus-related health issue would be eligible for disability benefits. On Sept. 11, first responders ran into Ground Zero not knowing that the toxic soup swirling above the mangled remains of the World Trade Center would leave them with life-long health problems and fatal cancers.  

More than half the nearly 8,000 ventilators the federal stockpile sent to states to fight the coronavirus pandemic went to New York, while the rest were split among 14 other states and territories, a report from the federal government shows. The report was released Wednesday by the U.S. House Oversight Committee amid criticism from its chairwoman that states with the biggest COVID-19 problems didn't get enough supplies. It gives the nation its closest look yet at how the Strategic National Stockpile distributed much-needed ventilators, N95 respirators, surgical masks and other protective equipment across the country since the pandemic began. The stockpile, which is operated within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, distributed the ventilators based on requests from areas with high case counts. New York received 4,400 ventilators.  

The fire was so hot that it melted a fire hose right off the hydrant. Paint and lights on fire trucks blistered, melting in the intense heat that night 35 years ago. The inferno on April 13, 1985, still stands as the city's biggest, engulfing the 300 block of South Davie Street. A 35-year old homeless man, Rozelle Bryant, died in the fire. It's believed he started the blaze unintentionally with a carelessly discarded cigarette. Several firefighters suffered injuries, but none were considered serious, and no civilians were hurt. Eight buildings were severely damaged or destroyed and the economic cost to some was in the millions. None of that was apparent when firefighter Paul Minor, Capt. Bob Bost and driver Craig Lewis hopped on Engine 4 shortly before 11 p.m., the first to respond to a report of smoke coming from a building in the turn-of-the-century warehouse district.  

FirstNet PTT service - provided by AT&T and built on 3GPP mission-critical-push-to-talk (MCPTT) standard - delivers the performance that public safety needs and can be an LMR alternative for some agencies, according to the captain of a New Jersey police department that conducted a beta trial of the new offering. "I think it's really going to be a game-changer for public safety communications," Capt. Guy Patterson of the Cranford (N.J.) police department said during an interview with IWCE's Urgent Communications. "I absolutely see [FirstNet PTT] as a replacement, especially as this current generation of LMR inevitably advances to whatever the next generation is. When it's time to make that move, and you have to do a very large capital project to update your infrastructure and everything else, it makes perfect sense just to abandon the LMR completely and go with the FirstNet Push to Talk."