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Chute and ladders: Trash fire erupts in Pru Center apartment building

Residents wait for all clear at 770 Boylston St. in the Back Bay

Residents wait for all clear. Photo by BFD.

Several feet of garbage at the bottom of a trash chute at 770 Boylston St. ignited overnight, starting a two-alarm fire that sent some residents into the chill night air.

Although the flames didn't reach very high in the 27-story building, the smoke did. The Boston Fire Department reports that while some residents were allowed to shelter in place, others were helped to evacuate, depending on how bad the smoke was in their apartments. The smoke was a particular issue in the 243-apartment building's middle levels, the department says.

The fire, reported around midnight, was declared out shortly after 2 a.m.

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Comments

What a horrible thing to happen. It's awful when anybody gets driven out of their house or apartment, even temporarily by a fire.

The fact that this happened, however, strongly indicates that having trash chutes inside apartment buildings is a very poor idea whose time has long past. Probably, the best thing would be, in such a large apartment building as that, would be to have some sort of a system where the trash would be forced to be chuted outside of the building, into a metal dumpster or something, which would/could be emptied every week by the city.

I do know that, while we had a trash chute in my building for a good long time, the chutes in our building's chute rooms (There was one on each of the 5 floors) were closed afew years ago, and people now put their full trash bags outside the building, in a metal dumpster. Much safer, imho.

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I have no idea what you're suggesting or what it would improve. A chute that goes outside is no safer than an indoor chute, it just makes the street smell awful and is ugly.

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Something really has to be done to prevent this kind of thing from happening again.

Maybe abolish the chute altogether and put a covered metal dumpster nearby. It'll only cause a minimum of inconvenience for people, especially those on the upper floors, to go down and dispose of their trash in the covered metal dumpster.

Or, if people don't want to go downstairs to dispose of their trash, then maybe the managers of the Prudential building should warn residents of that building to really watch what they put down the chute.

One of the reasons that the chute rooms in our building were permanently closed, and people had to take their full trash bags down to the metal dumpster near our building is because many people were really into abusing the chutes--inotherwords, putting all kinds of crazy stuff down those chutes that should not have been put down them in the first place.

Another reason that the chute rooms in our building were permanently closed is because it's no longer the "in" thing to have trash chutes inside buildings.

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