June 6, 2007

Published in Wake Forest, NC

            Fire Chief Rodney Privette says the fires at 546 and 542 Redford Place Drive underscore the need for a ladder truck and more personnel. They also demonstrate how fast a fire can involve a building.

            “One of the neighbors said they heard an explosion and looked and said the deck was already burned off the house. The house was completely involved when we got there in about two minutes. Gosh, it was going,” Privette said.

            The fire had started from cleaning materials, stripper, cardboard and the gas tank left after the owners of the first house, Christopher and Kimberly McCord, had been cleaning and refinishing their deck.

            The natural gas line in the yard was also burning when firefighters arrived, and the fire had reached the top of the first house and was up in the attic, Privette said. The wind was blowing heat and flames toward the second house owned by Raven Bennett. The houses are less than 20 feet apart.

            Vinyl siding “was falling like dominos before we got a water curtain on it,” Privette said. “We were on the scene when the second one caught fire and burned up.” If the wind had been blowing hard, as it was for a recent apartment complex fire in Raleigh, Privette said, “we would have lost six or seven houses.”

            That water curtain to put a shield between two tall structures such as these houses or to attack a fire at the top of a two- or three-story home can only come from an aerial ladder truck. The Wake Forest Fire Department supplied that as soon as they could arrive and set up.

            Privette said the fire call went to Rolesville and New Hope, the nearby cooperating fire department, first. “When we got to there and saw what we had, we called Wake Forest, then we called Hopkins because the woods had caught on fire, and then we called Eastern Wake.”

            “We’re going to need one,” Privette said of an aerial ladder truck. But, he said, the department is so far behind it will not be able to use a ladder truck “until we get some personnel to run it.”

            The department has six full-time paid personnel, two on each shift, and 33 volunteers on its roster.

            Right now, though, one of the full-time day firefighters is in the hospital, leaving just one person at the station. Privette has been asking volunteers to fill in and Roy Ed Jones, a longtime fire chief who has retired and is in his late 70s, has taken to hanging around the fire station, Privette said.

            He did get two pieces of good news Monday night. His son and daughter-in-law presented him with his first grandchild, and the Rolesville Town Board informally agreed to increase the fire department’s budget.

            However, Privette is going to turn to Wake County for the real money. Only 17 or 18 percent of the department’s budget comes from the town; the rest is from the property in the rural fire district.

            It will stay that way, Privette said, because so much of the Rolesville rural district is in the Little River watershed where Raleigh will not allow water and sewer extensions. “We’ll always have a county base,” Privette said, and that typically means larger, taller homes.

            To the south and west, Rolesville is losing chunks of its rural district to Raleigh and Wake Forest. Raleigh has annexed the large subdivision Centex Homes is building south of Forestville Road on the west side of U.S. 401, and Wake Forest has annexed several subdivisions along Forestville, Burlington Mills and Ligon Mill roads that once were in the Rolesville district. Privette said he planned to call Wake Forest planner Chad Sary that day (Tuesday) to say, “Please let me know when you annex in our area.”

            Both Privette and Wake Forest Fire Chief Jerry Swift spoke about the fire danger posed by vinyl siding. Swift called it “gasoline siding. It is highly combustible. It does not take much radiant heat from a fire to damage or ignite vinyl siding.”