DEL.ICIO.USFire trucks rolled all night in DeKalb
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Monday, November 24, 2008
Another fire. The trucks headed into the night, lights flashing red, flashing trouble.
Once again, Sunday night and Monday morning, DeKalb firefighters jumped out of their engines, pulled hoses to douse another blaze. This one licked at a building adjacent to a business on James B. Rivers Drive in Stone Mountain. A DeKalb cop pulled up. He voiced what everyone was thinking: “What is going on in this arsonist’s mind?”
Jason Getz/jgetz@ajc.com
Motor Venture Auto Sales owner Sam Epeagba talks on the phone as he walks by his destroyed business at 6121 Memorial Drive.
“I don’t know,” said fire Capt. Eric Jackson, who’d plotted the march of fires since dispatchers reported the first about 4 p.m. Sunday. “But I think you need to head north.”
Jackson believed they were after a phantom, someone who lit fires and vanished. It would be a long night.
By the time the last fire was out — reported before daylight Monday at a day care center, 13 hours after the first call came in — firefighters had put down 11 blazes, officials said. Most were on, or close to, a two-mile stretch of Memorial Drive just east of I-285.
They ranged from a grass fire on the side of a highway to a conflagration that swept through Sunday School classrooms at a Baptist church. They included a building that was no more than a garage. The fires claimed the livelihood of a used-car dealer. They charred a car-rental agency. They destroyed the day care center where children learned to sing and dance.
They left firefighters stunned, exhausted and frustrated. No lives were lost, no one was hurt.
State Insurance Commissioner John Oxendine on Monday said one fire had been ruled arson. The others, he said, might have been intentionally set but it was “premature” to conjecture.
As a rainy Monday dawned, the fire trucks returned to their stations. Investigators began chasing their phantom. Had anyone seen anything? Any vehicles on the scenes?
Jackson, who is the department’s public information officer, began connecting the dots he’d assembled as he raced from one fire scene to the next.
The first call had come before sundown Sunday, a day of shifting clouds and lowering skies. Fire. Dispatchers said it was at American Transmissions, 5965 Memorial Drive. Station 11, based in Stone Mountain, rolled.
Jackson, who was at home, got a call, and he suspected the worst: On Friday, someone had set fires at two automotive businesses on Memorial Drive. This latest fire was at a business that caters to the automotive industry. He rolled, too.
It wasn’t a big fire: some grass that ignited, jumped to trees, then burned gutters and metal at the rear of the building. It was, the owner would say later, the first mishap he’d suffered in 20 years of keeping gears spinning smoothly.
The radio, again: Fire. This time, it was at Enterprise Rent-a-Car, 5885 Memorial Drive — a block west of the transmission company. Firefighters from another station hit the street.
It wasn’t big: a porch afire on the building, a wooden structure built to resemble an oversized bungalow. Firefighters moved fast; the flames flickered then died.
At 8 p.m., dispatchers leaned into their microphones again: Fire. This time, it was a church — Indian Creek Baptist, at the corner of Memorial Drive and Rockbridge Road. Firefighters faced a bigger flame. Smoke poured from the vents in the roof of the sanctuary, a solid building where two hours earlier people had enjoyed an evening meal.
Pulling hoses and shouting, firefighters aimed at the third fire to bloom on Memorial Drive in four hours.
Fire! DeKalb firefighters scrambled into pumper trucks and headed to Stone Mountain, where a hair salon was burning. Firefighters squeezed their engines into the narrow street and did what they do. They aimed silver arcs of water and knocked down a red wall of fire.
Jackson took the tally: four fires. It wasn’t even midnight.
Fire! Hardwoods burning behind a local funeral home. Fire! A building on James B. Rivers Drive in Stone Mountain, spewing sparks. Fire! A crackling blaze on the side of U.S. 78.
Still the reports came in. Stations from North Druid Hills, Avondale Estates and Tucker, from Brockett Road and Snapfinger Road, 14 stations in all: They rode through the night, rolling onto streets slick with a late rain.
The firefighters responded to blazes at Stone Mill Elementary on Sheila Drive. They raced to Motor Venture Auto Sales on 6121 Memorial Drive, where flames melted walls, charred metal girders and destroyed the one-story structure. They went back to Enterprise Rent-a-Car, where another flame ate at a back wall where workers prep cars before renting them again.
As the night waned, a final call, just up Memorial Drive and off an adjacent street: Fire!
It was too late for Trademark Fine Arts Academy. A one-story building, sheltered by young hardwoods, the structure on Lauren Parkway was engulfed when firefighters got there with lights and hoses.
The flames peeled back metal walls, charred wooden timbers and melted plastic toys. When morning came, rain fell through the burned roof and landed on a floor where children had played the week before.
Monday afternoon, Jackson, who spent the night chasing engines chasing fires, looked at the ruined day care center. “This,” he said, “is someone we need to get hold of very quickly.”
Services »
