Seven Weeks Later, Another Fire Lights Up Woodbridge Village

Less than two months after a devastating fire destroyed several apartment buildings and made several hundred victims homeless, in Avenel late Friday afternoon.

This time, the fire was confined to the kitchen in one of the apartments, while several other habitations nearby sustained smoke damage, said Lieut. Greg Conklin.

There were no injuries, but the number of fire engines, police cars, and emergency vehicles on scene bespoke the urgency that a fire in that complex holds for EMS workers in Woodbridge after the .

Dozens of residents were out on the grounds, worriedly watching a ladder truck move into place to fight the fire.

Many of them stood near where the Woodbridge Village apartments, destroyed in the July fire once stood, were plowed under.

Jorald Bastien pulled up in her SUV, window rolled down, and blurted out, "Oh my God! You have got to be kidding! Not again!"

Bastien had had an apartment at 3603 Village Drive - one of the buildings that burned to the ground in July. She has since moved to another apartment in the complex.

"This is just frightening. This is scary. What's wrong with these apartments?" she said, looking worried at the phalanx of fire engines across the empty field where her home used to be.

There may have been no more fortunate man in Woodbridge Village than Susheel Kaushik. He was on his second floor balcony, looking over at the fire, but he was really there to oversee the moving men taking his family's belongings out of the apartment.

Friday was his last day at Woodbridge Village.

"We just closed on a home in Monroe," Kaushik smiled. "It's very peaceful, very country-like there. It's where I want to bring up my sons."

He looked around at the other apartment dwellers who were watching the fire engines and waiting for a replay of the July fire.

"I feel bad for them," Kaushik said. "They have to stay behind. I am also sentimental about this apartment. My two sons were born here."

He looked back at the fire engines, and ahead at the huge brown field fronting his apartment that once held an entire apartment complex. 

"I am glad, though, that we are going."

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