Wednesday afternoon, the Regal apartment building on Kanawha Boulevard, distinctive among Charleston’s buildings that line the Kanawha River with its almost khaki-colored brick, stood as it has for decades. This morning, it’s a pile of ash and rubble.
Miraculously, in a building with 35 of the 37 units occupied, everyone is accounted for and no serious injuries have yet been reported after the blaze that broke out sometime in the early afternoon continued into the night.
Quick work by all stations of the Charleston Fire Department to get people out of the building is to be commended, as are the efforts from fire departments in South Charleston, Malden and Pinch, which were on standby should another fire break out anywhere else in Charleston.
The Red Cross is working with the building’s management, the nonprofit Patriot Services Group, which provides housing to “at-risk” veterans, to arrange temporary housing for everyone displaced by the fire. That’s a crucial service for people who lost just about everything, including a roof over their heads, in the dead of winter.
Make no mistake, this could have been a calamity well beyond a collapsed building. Residents told the Gazette-Mail that they didn’t hear the building’s fire alarm go off at any point. One woman visiting a friend at the apartment complex said she was alerted of the situation by a man yelling from the street that the building was ablaze and everyone needed to get out. Another said a relative called him and told him the building was on fire. Firefighters on the scene said they heard similar stories from residents.
The building’s fire alarm and suppression system, or whatever is left of it, will be inspected. A spokeswoman for Patriot at the scene of the fire Wednesday said she couldn’t comment on statements regarding the alarm.
The possibility of a malfunctioning fire alarm and suppression system raised grim speculation of how bad this could’ve been, best summarized by building resident Seth DiStefano.
“If something like this had happened at night and the fire alarm had not [gone off], I don’t want to even think about what the consequences are,” he told Gazette-Mail reporter Lori Kersey.
Indeed, if the fire had started a few hours later, it could have been disastrous. There aren’t many people walking Kanawha Boulevard on January nights when it’s cold and dark. What if there wasn’t anyone walking by to shout at residents within? What if someone hadn’t noticed the fire and called a relative living the in the building?
Fortunately, that’s not what happened. Hopefully, investigators can piece together what went wrong. It’s a stark reminder that safety systems are there for a reason and building owners and managers should always be sure those systems are functioning properly.
