According to Eatonton Fire Department Chief Jamey Williamson, last week, firefighters responded to fires at three different houses last week, according to Eatonton Fire Chief Jamey Williamson.
All three buildings were vacant, and no one was injured.
Jesse Porter Street
The most recent fire was in a doublewide mobile home on the 100 block of West Jesse Porter Street. Williamson said they got the call around 8:45 a.m. Sunday, March 2. When firefighters arrived on the scene, heavy smoke was billowing from the house.
“It was behind the Eatonton Co-op and right next to Montgomery Homes,” he noted.
The fire, including hot spots, was extinguished within 30 minutes. Williamson called the state fire marshal, who looked at the scene and agreed that the fire started inside a trash can next to the doublewide.
“We don’t know what it was, but something in that trash can caught on fire, and we don’t know why,” Williamson said.
The fire melted the siding on the doublewide, crept up the wall, and started burning underneath the roof.
“It did burn through the roof and inside the house,” he added. “It was a lot of smoke.”
The property, which had been vacant for some time, is owned by Sally Mae Burke of Atlanta. The cause of the fire remains unknown.
Mulberry Street
On Wednesday, Feb. 26, at 9:40 a.m., Eatonton firefighters responded to a fire in a one-story house on the 100 block of Mulberry Street.
Williamson said the house was owned by Howard Calvin of Milledgeville and had been abandoned for some time.
According to the tax assessor records on qPublic, the wood-frame house was approximately 500 square feet and had one bathroom but no bedrooms.
After checking to make sure no one was inside the house, water from the city and county fire departments’ tanker trucks was used to extinguish the fire. While they were dousing the blaze, the eave of the roof on a concrete block building next door caught fire, and they quickly extinguished that.
“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.]”
A few hours later, they were called back to the same address because the roof of the concrete block building was engulfed in flames.
“The fire marshal came, and he thinks that an ember from the first fire was blown by the wind and caused that fire,” Williamson said.
The house had no electricity or gas hooked up to it, and the owner did not have insurance on the property, he noted.
“We do know that Eatonton Police Department has had to handle problems with vagrants going in that house, but we don’t know what the cause of the fire is,” Williamson said. “So I guess no harm, no foul.”
MLK Jr. Drive
At the same time, two houses on Mulberry Street were burning.
Williamson said he went to check on a lot of smoke that had been reported on Martin Luther King Jr. Drive. It turned out to be logging debris being burned after some property was cleared.
“We went and checked it, and it was all under control,” he said.
Firefighters and trucks from the city and the county responded to the Jesse Porter and Mulberry Street fires.
“The city and the county always work well together,” Williamson said.