AMHERST, MA (WGGB/WSHM) -- More than 230 UMass Amherst students remain homeless after a devastating fire on Friday evening destroyed their apartment building.

According to fire crews, calls started coming in around 8 p.m. Friday reporting a fire at a building that was under construction.  Officials arrived to find the building engulfed in flames and the fire spreading to nearby buildings.

While there have been no reported injuries, those hundreds of UMass students are now without a place to live and without all of their belongings.  On Saturday, the fire department shared with us the efforts to put the fire out were slowed by poor water pressure in the area, which led the town manager to call a state of emergency.

Since the fire broke out, Western Mass News has received several comments on our Facebook post about the fire and one viewer posted the question: “Weren’t these buildings fairly new!? Why did they burn so fast?”  Amherst Fire Chief Lindsay Stromgren explained that, even though this was a newer building with working sprinklers, the system was no match for such fierce flames.  “Sprinkler systems, like this for residential structures, are not designed for this type of fire load.  They’re designed to put out a small fire in your apartment when it starts, not to have a massive fire load that we saw from the #47 Olympia Drive, which originally caught fire, the building under construction,” he said.

Stromgren added that this three-alarm fire took several mutual aid departments to put out.  He noted, for comparison, the last fire that could even compare was in the mid-1980s when the Amherst College gymnasium caught fire.

The cause of the fire remains under investigation at this time.

While we could not speak with UMass in-person on Monday, the university’s provost and senior vice chancellor for academic affairs wrote a letter to faculty that read, in part:  “The affected students, many of whom have lost their belongings, including laptops and course material, will require academic accommodations as they recover from the fire.  I ask that you provide these accommodations and work with your students in the coming days to give them the space, support, and time they need.”

As for how you can help those impacted students, the UMass Amherst Foundation’s Student Care and Emergency Response Fund collects and distributes emergency financial support to those impacted. You can CLICK HERE for more information or to donate.

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