YORK, Pa. (WHTM) — All six homes badly damaged by what investigators call two separate, adjacent fires Sunday night are condemned — too dangerous to enter.

But four of the homes are still standing, while demolition crews quickly flattened two of the homes less than a day after the fires.

What was the difference between the four still standing and the two that aren’t — demolished before the people who lived there could try to salvage any valuables, photos or other keepsakes?

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“Those two particular structures, based on my opinion and the opinion of the city engineer, were in an active state of collapse and an imminent danger to public safety,” Steve Buffington, the city’s building code official, said Tuesday.

That danger is why officials didn’t go through a longer process they would typically follow before demolishing a condemned building. Buffington — who was at the site during the demolition — said it was a decision he didn’t make lightly.

“It was tragic yesterday watching somebody’s life torn down – you know, their lifetime memories and mementos they’ll never get to see,” Buffington said. But he said he had to worry more about their safety than their possessions.

The demolished homes were the southernmost duplex of the six — on the east side of the 500 block of North Pershing Avenue — that burned Sunday.

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Buffington explained a condemnation notice doesn’t automatically mean a building has to be demolished — only that it’s currently “unsafe and cannot be occupied.”

So as for the other four homes?

“It would be possible to repair all of them,” Buffington said. But “it might not economically viable.”

That’s a common situation with fire-damaged homes, he said: often more of an economic question (for homeowners and insurance companies) than an engineering one, because sometimes it costs more to save a home than to demolish it and start over.

Buffington said the middle two affected homes — those immediately north of the two demolished Monday — aren’t collapsing but are in rough enough shape that economics could lead to their demolition. The northernmost homes of the six, he said, looked like better candidates to save in an economically viable way.

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