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» For more photos, see this story on the (Gloversville) Leader-Herald Web site » Residents react with shock to four fire deaths

WELLS - Four developmentally disabled residents of a Riverview group home perished in an early morning fire Saturday in the first fatal blaze in this small Adirondack town in more than 20 years.

The two men and two women who died were residents of the Riverview Individual Residential Alternative group home at 1534 Route 30. The home was under the auspices of the Sunmount Developmental Disabilities Services Office in Tupper Lake, a division of the state Office of Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities.

Another resident was evacuated from the home by fire officials and air-lifted to St. Elizabeth Hospital in Utica, where she was in stable condition Saturday, according to OMRDD officials.

Two of the dead perished in the home, and the others died en route to Albany Medical Center hospital. Five other residents were in the home at the time, as were two Sunmount aides. The home is a 24-hour-supervised, state-operated facility.

The two aides were able to evacuate the four of the five surviving residents before the quickly moving blaze prevented them from entering the home. Three of those residents are now at a Sunmount facility in Speculator, and another resident and the two aides were being treated at Nathan Littauer Hospital in Gloversville, according to news releases from Gov. David Paterson and the state police.

The New York Civil Liberties Union said in a news release that two of the dead, the resident flown to Utica and two of the surviving residents were members of the Willowbrook Class, the plaintiffs in the NYCLU's 1972 class-action case that asserted constitutional rights for people with developmental disabilities who had lived at the Willowbrook State School on Staten Island.

Fire officials did not cite a cause for the blaze Saturday, but the NYCLU said in its news release, "The blaze appears to have been an electrical fire and the sprinkler system was knocked out immediately. The home only had a small, manual generator which may have been inadequate for the purposes of operating a sprinkler system."

Investigators with the state Office of Fire Prevention and Control and state Police Bureau of Criminal Investigation are handling the investigation into the cause of the blaze, which broke out at about 5:30 a.m. OMRDD spokeswoman Nicole Weinstein said the office Saturday did not have causes of death for the deceased and did not know what caused the blaze.

The home was built in May 2008 and the residents moved into it in June, said OMRDD Commissioner Diana Jones Ritter, who was on the scene Saturday afternoon. It was a state-of-the-art facility with a sprinkler system and a fire alarm, she said.

State Bureau of Criminal Investigation Senior Investigator Karl Meybaum said police will likely release the names of the deceased within the next few days. He said a cause is being investigated but officials do not believe it was intentionally set.

The residents were both ambulatory and wheelchair-bound, Meybaum said. Others needed walkers or canes to move around.

At least two of the four dead were unable to move around without some sort of assistance, Meybaum said.

The residents' mental and physical disabilities may have added to the difficulty in their evacuation, he said.

Officials do not know the home addresses of the residents, Meybaum said. He said they may be local or may be from various parts of the state.

Officials from fire departments in Wells, Hope, Northville, Speculator and Lake Pleasant responded to the blaze, which left the one-story home gutted and its roof burned off.