Fighting fire from the sky
A helicopter drops water on a hot spot in the Park Road fire near Inks Lake in Burnet County on Monday.
Before the July 20 apartment fire in San Marcos that killed five people and uprooted nearly 200 from their homes, even the worst fires in the city rarely resulted in loss of life.
San Marcos Fire Chief Les Stephens said the fire that tore through the Iconic Village and Vintage Pads apartments was the deadliest blaze in the city’s history.
Authorities recovered the bodies of Haley Michele Frizzell, 19; David Ortiz, 21; Dru Estes, 20; and James Miranda, 23, from the debris. Although authorities are trying to confirm the identify of a fifth body found, they have said the last person unaccounted for in the fire is 21-year-old Belinda Moats.
“As far as I know, we have never had as many fatalities in one fire,” said Rick Rowell, an assistant chief overseeing operations. “I remember around 2006 an apartment fire on Thorpe (Lane) with one fatality. She was on the bed and apparently fell asleep with a cigarette.”
Rowell also remembered “a trailer house where the fire ran out of oxygen and went out, but the woman living there suffocated as well.”
“There was a house fire many years back that I don’t think was in the city limits where a child was lost,” he said. “That is all I recall where there was a fatality.”
Rowell also remembered two fires at the Hill Country Apartments, across the street from Iconic Village, that seemed similar to the deadly blaze earlier this month.
“The fire was very well-developed before our arrival and had progressed beyond the point of allowing an interior attack,” he said. “All that was left to do was establish cutoff points and protect exposures.”
The San Marcos Fire Department includes 75 sworn employees and 67 on the operations staff. In the first seven months of this year, the city’s firefighters have responded to 17 commercial or residential building fires — an average of more than two a month.
The department’s five fire stations house three engines and two ladder trucks that each carry three firefighters. A battalion chief vehicle can carry two people.
The engines and ladder trucks go to every structure fire in the city, bringing to the scene as many as 17 firefighters — the minimum number of on-duty firefighters in San Marcos at any given time.
Even with a full staff the night of the July 20 fire, the scope of the blaze and ensuing investigation prompted Stephens to call on the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to lead the investigation.
“They brought close to 60 people to town over the last nine days,” Stephens said. “I don’t have 60 people; that’s my entire operations division.”
The ATF sent Austin-based agents to the fire immediately and followed up by pouring dozens of National Response Team members into the area, ATF spokeswoman Nicole Strong said.
“In something like this, the city of San Marcos doesn’t really have the resources to process a scene like that,” Strong said.
ATF National Response Teams are made up of certified fire investigators, bomb technicians, scientists and engineers, detection K-9s and handlers, and forensics experts. They can be dispatched anywhere in the country within 24 hours, Strong said.
Since the response team was formed in 1978, members have been called out more than 820 times.
“The NRT responding to things like this, apartment fires of this magnitude, is not uncommon,” she said.
The team also responded to the Austin bombings in March and the 2013 fertilizer plant explosion in West that killed 12 first responders and injured 200 people. About six weeks after the West blast, ATF investigated the Southwest Inn fire in Houston that left five firefighters dead and 12 others injured.
“That was a little more closely aligned” with the Iconic Village fire, Strong said. “It was a hotel, a multiunit structure.”
Investigators have spent the 10 days since the San Marcos fire combing through evidence to figure out what caused the blaze.
Strong said fires can fall into one of three categories: accidental cause, intentionally set with an incendiary or undetermined. She said investigators usually complete their final report on a fire within roughly 30 days. ATF agents left the fire scene around noon Monday and investigators conducted more than 100 interviews related to the case, Strong said.