New Delhi, July 19 -- KROKSTADELVA, NORWAY - The call came on Friday afternoon, and there was no time to pack. More than 400 residents of this Drammen suburb fled as fire spread from a single townhouse through attached rowhouses and into the surrounding forest, ultimately destroying more than 100 buildings in what Norwegian emergency authorities described as the largest residential fire in the country's modern history.

Lars Jacob Hiim, director of the Norwegian Directorate for Civil Protection and Emergency Planning (DSB), said the scale of destruction was without precedent in modern records. The blaze, which began Friday afternoon in the Krokstadelva area of southeastern Norway, consumed more residential buildings in a single event than...