Fourteen firefighters were injured on Saturday morning while battling a blaze at a Metro Self Storage facility in Charleston, a neighborhood in Staten Island, N.Y. The four-alarm fire began just before 10 a.m. at the back of the property at 3026 Veterans Road W., according to a source.

It took about 150 firefighters two hours to get the fire under control. Forty to 50 storage units containing household goods, construction materials and a car were destroyed, according to James Leonard, chief of the Fire Department of the City of New York. The smoke made accessing the interiors of the units difficult, he added. "We had to use saws to open them (storage units) up.”

Three firefighters suffered serious injuries, while the remainder had minor ones. None were considered life-threatening, a source reported. The injured were transported to local hospitals.

The cause of the fire is under investigation.

Headquartered in Lake Forest, Ill., Metro Storage LLC is a privately owned, fully integrated real estate operating company that owns more than 120 self-storage properties in 12 states. It specializes in the acquisition, development and management of self-storage facilities nationwide. Metro’s facilities comprise more than 8.1 million square feet of storage space.

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