Aid sought for families left homeless by Youngstown apartment fire

Mar. 7—Online donations are being sought for four families, totaling 19 people, left homeless by a Tuesday night town house fire in Youngstown.

The Youngstown Fire Company's Facebook page links to the fundraisers for the four families: Kimberly and Nick Salvatore and their three children; Kyle and Kristen Nablo and their three children; Crystal and Vinnie Levering and their three children; and Janelle and Kevin Voelker and their two children.

The building, owned by Vincent Jowdy of Lewiston, contained four town houses, each of them two stories with an individual basement and its own number.

Kyle Nablo said the fire started in his home, 310 Main. "I'm just grateful that my family made it out OK and that all the other families made it out OK," Nablo said.

He said smoke alarms went off to alert him to the blaze.

"It happened really fast. It was a really traumatic experience having three young children under 8, having to get them outside with very limited clothing on," Nablo said.

"It was starting in the basement or somewhere amongst the first floor. There was so much fire damage and it was so late when the investigators were there, it was hard to pinpoint any specific location as to the cause," Youngstown Fire Chief Greg Quarantillo said.

"Everybody was in bed except for me," Janelle Voelker said. "Crystal Levering was the first one to call in the alarm, because her husband heard a fire alarm going off. He walked down his stairs, went to the basement, flipped on the basement light, saw that his basement was filled with smoke, screamed there was a fire, 'Everybody out!' "

"He started throwing stuff out the door, blankets and stuff," Crystal Levering said of her husband. "We have cats. He went back in for the cats. We got two out. The other two we found hiding (after the fire). They were hiding under the kids' beds. One was a little burned on the face. They had smoke inhalation."

"Kimberly and Nick were in bed, their children were in bed," Voelker continued. "Nick said to Kimberly, 'I think I see flickering outside. Is the house on fire?' She rounded up the kids. Kimberly came downstairs to see what was going on, the only way I can explain it was, nails on a chalkboard that hit my door as she scratched my door to whip it open to scream, 'Get out of the house! It's fully engulfed in flames!' "

Before she and her husband left, Voelker was running around her home to grab blankets because the Salvatore children were outside wearing no shirts.

Quarantillo said the fire is "not suspicious at this point. It could have been electrical, it could have been a faulty dryer or washing machine or something along those lines. Something could have shorted out. The building was built in the 1930s. There is some knob-and-tube wiring in there. There's a hundred different avenues that could have started this fire."

Quarantillo said he arrived on the scene in about 30 seconds after being dispatched.

"When I pulled on location, the flames were already shooting out the back of the building," the chief said. "There was rather a large amount of fire."

Youngstown volunteers received mutual aid from firefighters from Lewiston, Ransomville and the Niagara Falls Air Reserve Station. The fire was brought under control in about 10 minutes, Quarantillo said. No dollar value has been placed on the damage.

Quarantillo said no one was hurt among the residents or the fire personnel, "So in my eyes, that's a fantastic evening."

The Salvatores, Nablos and Leverings all had pages at GoFundMe.com set up by friends, but Voelker said she refused to do that after a friend, Tonya Leveille-Rilko, offered to do so. Voelker did allow her friend to set up a Facebook donation page.

"I'm a very humble person. I'm struggling really bad with this. I had renter's insurance where my next-door neighbors with three young children did not," Voelker said. "My thought process behind it was, 'Let the money go to them. They need it more than I do.' And I'm being told, 'No, you need it as much as they do. We're all in this together.' "

As of Saturday night, the GoFundMe pages had brought in $9,881 for the Nablos, $5,455 for the Salvatores and $4,260 for the Leverings. All the residents are living with relatives.

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