A fire destroyed the Big Brothers Big Sisters building Tuesday morning.<\/p>\n
The Manhattan Fire Department responded to the fire at 519 Pierre St., a house that serves as the organization\u2019s offices, shortly after 8:15 a.m. Flames and heavy smoke were coming out many windows of the building when officials arrived.<\/p>\n
Deputy fire chief Ryan Almes said no one was in the building at the time of the fire, and there were no injuries. He did not yet have information on how the fire started.<\/p>\n
Michelle Sink, the area director of Big Brothers Big Sisters, told The Mercury the fire caused a total loss of the building. She said the organization\u2019s members are thankful for the outpouring of community support they\u2019ve received and stressed the importance of the continuance of their work.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur mission is not a building,\u201d Sink said. \u201cOur mission is helping kids, and so we\u2019re going to continue to do that. We won\u2019t have any lapse in our program.\u201d<\/p>\n
President and CEO of Kansas Big Brothers Big Sisters Mary Shannon said in a social media post that all staff members are safe, but the office appears destroyed. Shannon said they will need an immediate temporary space to continue their work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A fire destroyed the Big Brothers Big Sisters building Tuesday morning. The Manhattan Fire Department responded to the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":114585,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[262,610,75,84,83,9,24,12,63],"class_list":{"0":"post-114584","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-manhattan","8":"tag-city","9":"tag-local","10":"tag-manhattan","11":"tag-manhattan-headlines","12":"tag-manhattan-news","13":"tag-new-york","14":"tag-new-york-city","15":"tag-news","16":"tag-nyc"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114584","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=114584"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114584\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/114585"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=114584"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=114584"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=114584"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}