A space heater was being used in an apartment on the second floor. Because of the conditions, what we would call quite cluttered, in that apartment -- there were a lot of paper, materials, fabric -- that provided the fire a lot of fuel to burn.

We do have a struggle when historic preservation is involved.

Fire investigators will go in after it's determined safe to go in. And it may be that they never go in to investigate. We've had situations like this before where the building is so unsafe that we're not going to put a fire investigator in there to get hurt.

There was a great volume of fire in the third-floor apartment.

Unfortunately they were pronounced dead at a local hospital shortly after they were rescued.

One firefighter carried one little boy down through the interior stairway and the other boy was taken out of a window and taken down to the ground by ladder.