Two families were displaced Tuesday by a predawn blaze at a south DeKalb County apartment complex.
The fire broke out before 5 a.m. at the Summerlyn Park complex off Fairington Road.
Melvin Thompson told the AJC that he woke up about 4:45 a.m. to an odor that “smelled like a burning candle in the house.”
“I got up, looked outside and I saw there was a brush fire down on the ground,” Thompson said. “I woke everybody up in the building and came outside with a cooler full of water and started throwing it on the brush fire, and by the time the fire department got here, that’s when we noticed it burning up though the wall to our unit.”
Thompson said he never heard any smoke detectors going off.
DeKalb fire Battalion Chief Cedric Fowler said three units, one of them vacant, were damaged.
“We’re pretty sure it started on the exterior and it worked its way on the inside,” Fowler said. “Once it gets behind the wall, it can go anywhere from there.”
He said that even though the flames climbed to the upper floors of the three-floor building, firefighters got a quick handle on things.
“We cleared the attic to make sure, because fire can start at the bottom, run right to the top, then it’s off to the races from there,” he said.
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