Coroner: 4 of 8 victims of dock fire were children
SCOTTSBORO, ALA.
Roughly two dozen people lived on Dock B at Jackson County Park Marina. They were middle-class folks who liked having a Tennessee River bywater for their backyard.
A fire that engulfed the wooden dock and destroyed about 35 boats, killing eight people who lived at the marina, transformed a comfortable, scenic spot into a place of mourning.
Tommy Jones, who lived on a 35-foot boat at the dock, helped others flee and swam to safety but lost his brother, who drowned while trying to escape. Jones struggled to stay composed while talking about the awful scene.
An Alabama coroner said Tuesday that four of the eight victims were children. Jackson County Coroner John Jordan hasn’t released the identities of any of the victims but said the children were ages 7, 9, 10, and 16, WHNT-TV reported. A cause of death has not been released.
Julie Jackson, who lives in a boat on another dock, can’t shake the sounds of people crying for help as the sky glowed orange from the flames.
“I don’t ever want to see anything like that again in my life,” she said.
David Kennamer has run a store at the marina for about two years, selling fishing gear and shaved-ice treats to kids. The deaths were incredibly saddening, he said.
“The rich folks would be in a bigger, nicer houseboat somewhere. These were just average people like me and you that love boating, staying on the water,” he said. “They love the boating life.”
Investigators on Tuesday were focusing on one boat in particular as a possible cause of the blaze and using floating barriers to contain environmental damage that officials said seemed minimal.
Crews will raise each sunken craft and check inside each to determine whether additional people might have died, said Fire Chief Gene Necklaus, but officials were optimistic that the death toll would not rise.
Investigators hadn’t determined the cause of the blaze, which erupted early Monday, but Necklaus said they were narrowing their focus to a vessel that was docked in an area where witnesses said the flames began.
Witnesses said wind quickly swept flames down the wooden dock where an undetermined number of people were sleeping on boats. Residents described a desperate fight for life, with some piling into boats to get away and others diving into water that was in the mid-50s to swim for their lives.
Kennamer said the only blessing was that the fire happened during a slow time when relatively few people were sleeping in boats at the dock. A blaze during the summer boating months could have been even worse.
“If this had happened in July it would have been so much more tragic,” he said.