READING, Pa. \u2014 A house fire in Reading has now claimed the lives of two people.<\/p>\n
A woman rescued from the burning home in the 900 block of Muhlenberg Street on Thursday died at Lehigh Valley Hospital near Allentown, according to the Berks and Lehigh county coroner’s offices.<\/p>\n
Catherine Dingle, 32, died of a combination of second- and third-degree burns over 86% of her body and smoke inhalation, the Lehigh County coroner said. Her death was ruled an accident.<\/p>\n
A 9-year-old boy who was also rescued from the fire died at Reading Hospital around 11 a.m. Thursday. An autopsy showed the Amanda Stout Elementary School student died of thermal burns and smoke inhalation, the Berks County coroner said.<\/p>\n
The boy’s name has not been released, but the school is offering grief counseling.<\/p>\n
Two other children were also rushed to the hospital, but authorities have not commented on their ages or conditions. They were being treated at St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children in Philadelphia, the Berks coroner said.<\/p>\n
A fire official had said some of the four taken to the hospital were in very critical condition, although it’s not clear how many.<\/p>\n
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Patrick Manwiller | 69 News<\/p>\n
Firefighters struck three alarms for additional crews as they battled the fire, which was reported shortly after 9:30 a.m. Thursday.<\/p>\n
“Based on witness interviews, the origin and cause investigation has determined that the fire originated on the first-floor rear kitchen area,” said Jeremy Searfoss, the city’s fire marshal. “The fire developed rapidly throughout the first floor, with smoke and heat traveling up an open stairwell to the second floor, trapping the occupants.”<\/p>\n
Officials said the fire likely broke out because of combustible items in or around a microwave. It has been classified as accidental.<\/p>\n
“We did locate a fire extinguisher outside of the building that was discharged,” Searfoss said, “and we also located a garden hose that the father of the children, that does live there, stated he did try to use early on to extinguish the fire.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"READING, Pa. \u2014 A house fire in Reading has now claimed the lives of two people. A woman…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":277749,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[214,279,128,130,129],"class_list":["post-277748","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-reading","tag-_homepage_top_stories","tag-berks","tag-reading-city","tag-reading-city-headlines","tag-reading-city-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277748","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=277748"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277748\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/277749"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=277748"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=277748"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=277748"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}