The air within the city of Eatonton was smoky on Feb. 26 due to two fires happening simultaneously, but Eatonton Fire Chief Jamey Williamson said everything is contained.
“All that smoke you see out there on Martin Luther King Drive, that’s Tom Thompson’s property, and they’ve been logging on that property the past six months or so, and they’re burning the debris,” Williamson said. “But they’ve got it all under control. We went and checked it, and it’s all under control.”
While en route to check that fire, Williamson received a call on his cell phone about another fire. The call came from someone at Rossee Oil Company, who could see the smoke from their building. The fire chief said while he was talking with that person to find the location, the 911 dispatcher sounded a tone at 9:42 a.m. for the fire department to respond to a structure fire on Mulberry Lane, which turned out to be the same fire.
The small wood-frame house was completely engulfed in flames when firefighters arrived on the scene.
“So there was nothing to save,” Williamson said. “Basically, we just put water on it and got it knocked down.”
Williamson said the one-story house, located on the 100 block of Mulberry and owned by Howard Calvin of Milledgeville, had been abandoned for some time.
According to the tax assessor records on qPublic, the house was small, around 500 square feet, and had one bathroom but no bedrooms.
“We checked to make sure nobody was inside the building in the fire, and there wasn’t,” Williamson said.
Although there are two fire hydrants near the location, Williamson said they needed only to use the water on the city and county tanker trucks to extinguish the fire.
“The county assisted us, and we had plenty of trucks and plenty of water, so it was no problem,” Williamson explained. “And we had it all out, including the hot spots, by 11:20. [a.m.]”
The house had no electricity or gas hooked up to it, so the cause of the fire is undetermined.
Williamson said the owner did not have insurance on the property, “so we’re going to close out this case.”