GUILDERLAND — After firefighters on Thursday evening had put out the flames from a kitchen fire in a Woodlake apartment, John Keimer said, “Another 10 or 15 minutes and we would have had a really big fire on our hands.”

No one was injured, said Keimer, spokesman and firefighter for the Westmere Fire Department. There was no one at home in the apartment, he added, and no pets.

The call came in at about 5 p.m. for smoke conditions, said Keimer, standing in front of Building 53 in the dark, as raw winds raced through the parking lot of the apartment complex off of Church and Schoolhouse roads in Guilderland.

Vertical blinds hung askew from above a blown-out window as Keimer spoke, the darkness of the apartment behind the blinds punctuated only by firefighters’ flashlights.

The first crew to arrive on the scene encountered heavy smoke in the outdoor stairwell leading up to one of the building’s second-floor apartments, he said.  

Firefighters made a “360 size-up,” he said, looking for fire from the front and the back of the building. They smashed out the apartment’s front window with a long pole, getting the smoke to lift, and did the same in back, so that they could assess the situation.

With the windows out, he said, a crew was able to go inside with a hand line, and located a small fire in the kitchen.

“They knocked it right down,” Keimer said, estimating that the fire was under control in five minutes.

“It looks as if there was a lot of heavy damage in the kitchen,” he said, adding that Guilderland Fire Prevention would be helping to determine the cause and the origin of the fire.

A young man and a firefighter carried clothing on hangers and a cardboard box out of the apartment located on the first floor, beneath the one with the fire.

“There was a fair amount of heat,” Keimer said. “It was good it was called in when it was.”

Appliances melted on the walls where the smoke detectors would be, Keimer said, calling the apartment “pretty much uninhabitable.”

The apartment with the fire, the one below, and the two next door — upstairs and down — were being evacuated on thursday evening. Keimer said the evacuation was done out of caution even though the other apartments did not appear to be damaged.

Tri-City Rentals, which owns Woodlake and several other complexes in town, provided temporary accommodations for the displaced residents.

The Albany County assessment rolls list Woodlake, with 411 apartments, in three sections, with a total full-market value of $25.4 million.

Westmere had mutual aid from North Bethlehem and Guilderland fire departments and requested standby from Fuller Road, Keimer said.