Neighbors say firefighters couldn't find hydrant as house burned

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By Ty Tagami

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Residents on a DeKalb County street where a house was destroyed by fire this week say it took firefighters at least half an hour to find a fire hydrant, access it and begin battling the blaze.

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Ty Tagami, ttagami@ajc.com The hydrant was obscured by shrubbery.

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“Every time I walk by here I get mad,” said James Radford as he looked at the charred remains of Hosie and Karen Steward’s home. “I get mad because it could have been my house.”

Radford and others have a litany of complaints, from the way some who called 911 early Wednesday were greeted by a recorded message, to the amount of time it took for fire trucks to arrive.

Chief among their concerns is what happened after the firefighters got to the street, which is near Lithonia in south DeKalb.

“They couldn’t fight the fire because they didn’t know where the fire hydrant was,” said Sabrina Favors, who lives next door to the Stewards. She and others say it took at least half an hour to locate and access the hydrant, which was just across the street from her house, surrounded by a thick bush that had to be cut away.

The Stewards, who lived in the 6000 block of King Way Walk, are staying with a family member in nearby Stone Mountain.

Karen Steward, reached by phone there, said she called 911 three times as she tried to evacuate her three children, ages 6 to 11. Each time, she got a recorded message telling her that an operator would come on the line shortly.

“And I’m thinking, ‘What if someone had a gun to my head?’” she said Thursday.

Steward can’t say how long it took firefighters to arrive, but she said it was too long.

“If they had gotten there in five minutes, [the fire] would have been contained in my garage, and there just would have been smoke damage,” she said.

A fire department spokesman said the house was “heavily” damaged.

On Thursday, burned furniture and a child’s tricycle were piled in the driveway. The windows were boarded up, and the exterior walls were smeared with soot.

The county says Steward was not the first caller in her neighborhood and that the first person did get through to a live operator – at 12:05 a.m. That person remained on the line at least eight minutes giving information to operators while other callers backed up into a “queue,” county spokeswoman Shelia Edwards said. There were 19 calls in all, Edwards said.

Meanwhile, Edwards said, firefighters were being dispatched.

The first ambulance was on the scene eight minutes later, followed by a fire truck at 12:16 a.m., Edwards said.

Edwards said county Public Safety Director William "Wiz" Miller listened to an audio recording of the incident afterward. The first fire truck on the scene carried its own load of water and firefighters could be heard on the recording deploying their hoses to spray immediately, she said. "That's what he's hearing on the tape," she said.

Edwards said Thursday night that officials were still listening to the recording to determine when water started flowing from the hydrant. But, she said, “they’re pretty sure it didn’t take 30 minutes.”

The neighbors, though, are adamant that it did. They also said no water was sprayed on the house until the hydrant was tapped.

"They were like clueless trying to figure out what's going on, and everything's in flames," said Radford, the neighbor across the street. "That house could have been saved."

Favors, the Stewards’ next door neighbor, said she watched and waited anxiously for the water to flow as the fire started to ignite the leaves on a tree between their homes.

“I was just so afraid it was going to catch my house then,” she said.

Steward said she had insurance on the house, but not its contents. Despite her loss, she is thankful that no one was hurt. She said the firefighters were “fantastic” once they arrived on the scene. “We have the most important thing,” she said: “our lives.”