No injuries were reported in a predawn fire that heavily damaged an apartment building in south DeKalb County.
The two-alarm fire broke out just after 4:30 a.m. at the Park on Candler complex in the 2500 block of Candler Road just north of I-20.
“When we got here, we had fire through the roof of the second-story apartment,” DeKalb fire Battalion Chief John Dorman said.
“We were able to make sure everybody got out OK and get a fire attack going,” Dorman told the AJC. “We were able to stop the fire about halfway down the building.”
Dorman said eight of the building’s 16 apartments were damaged by fire, and another four or five units sustained smoke damage.
While Dorman said that fire crews had no problems getting access to water, some residents claimed that there was only one working hydrant in the complex.
“They didn’t have enough water,” Samantha Evei told the AJC. “How do you have so many apartments and only one working hose? It’s a management problem; you only have one working fire hydrant. How can that be?”
Evei said she, her mother and her nephew were asleep when “we heard banging on our door and I heard, ‘get out.’
“Our fire alarm didn’t even go off,” she said. “We grabbed my nephew and just ran out.”
Evei said that when she first got outside, the fire was “just in the far corner" of the building away from her apartment. "We kept hoping our apartment would be OK, but they couldn’t contain it and it spread.”
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