By Micah Flores
Times-News (Burlington, North Carolina)
BURLINGTON, N.C. — The Golden Corral restaurant fire on Dec. 26 took lots of manpower and resources to subdue. Here’s how firefighters went about their business that day.
At 7:10 a.m., the morning after Christmas, red lights flashed and sirens screamed. Fire engine II rolled out of its East Webb Avenue substation and into a cold rain.
Command had pulled the second alarm and Burlington’s fire reserves were well in route to the blaze at the Golden Corral restaurant on Garden Road.
“When fire is flaming through the roof on arrival,” said Tim Allbritton, the engine company’s captain, “we know through experience — it has been burning awhile.” The first calls for service, which were activated via automatic motion detector and by employees of neighboring Chick fil-A and Steak ‘n Shake, came in at 7:06 a.m. According to video surveillance, the fire initially sparked 15 minutes earlier when an electrical outlet under a cabinet at the bottom of the restaurant’s vegetable serving bar began to smolder.
Staging at the neighboring Chick-fil-A parking lot, All britton’s crew assembled as he reported to the site’s command post for assignment. All the while, four outside teams or divisions, an aerial ladder truck, backup crews, safety officers, and a rehab and staging area, were coming together at the scene.
The bed of the ladder truck — slick with patches of morning ice — was pulled into place. Allbritton, engineer Jeremy Guthrie and firefighter Jason Faulkner found them selves climbing up the ladder’s icy rungs and onto the un burned side of the restaurant’s shingled roof.
Charged with sawing and punching out a ventilation hole near the seat of the fire below, the team cautiously tapped toward the engulfed kitchen side of the structure with a pike poll. The ventilation cut, firefighters explained, works like a chimney by allow ing the pent up fire a place to escape.
The pike pole is just one of many tools of the trade.
Besides pulling out and knocking down debris, it’s also used for tapping or testing sections of roof for stability. A possible roof collapse is never far from the minds of firefighters.
In this case, a partial collapse did happen, but not where the men were stationed.
“We were going to cut a vent hole over the dessert bar when a collapse over at the kitchen occurred,” Allbritton recalled from a headquarters class room days after the blaze.
The team was immediately ordered to abort their over head attempts and the strategy shifted — as it would through out the wind and rain-struck morning — to more of an exte rior or defensive attack.
Now focusing their energy on the collapsed kitchen area of the restaurant, outside divisions A and B prepped their fire hoses for battle.
In all, eight attack-hose lines, the majority of which were 2 1/2 inches in diameter and capable of dispersing more than 200 gallons of water per minute, were used.
“You take out whatever you need according to the incident,” said L.C. Chrismon, the Burlington Fire Department’s battalion chief.
Chrismon — who took charge of the Golden Corral’s scene from a designated command site — emphasized later in a training meeting the importance of safety and oper ating within the department’s tactical operating procedures.
“It’s not freelancing,” added Michael Willets, the department’s deputy chief who served as the department’s public information officer at the scene. “Freelancing gets firefighters killed.”
Starting their 8 a.m. shifts, extra firefighters reported to the scene from the department’s five prospective substations. Assisting at the Golden Corral would be the first assignment of their 24- hour shifts.
With a convergence of the two shifts, the number of fire suppression personnel working the Golden Corral scene grew throughout the morning.
An estimated 40 members of the department had come together in an orchestration of heavily controlled chaos. With all but one Burlington engine company dispatched to the scene, area fire departments were in turn called upon to man the Burlington substa tions.
At 7:45 a.m., engineer Drew Smith and firefighters Chris Turner and Greg Priska, of C division, which bordered the Chick-fil-A side of the restau rant, staged their first aggres ive interior attack. Entering from a yet-to-be-burned side of the dining room, Smith, who manned the hose’s nozzle, said later that the hardest part of entering a burning building with limited visibility is simply lifting or “getting the line to the fire.” Rigged from an outside hydrant to an engine’s water tank, 200 feet of water-filled hose was dragged behind the men into the restaurant and through its smoke-filled maze.
Figuring that water in the hose weighs more than 8 pounds per gallon, Smith said backup is essential when pulling around an estimated 400- to 500-pound section of hose. What’s more, he said, wearing cumbersome fire pro tective gear, while necessary to survival, adds to the struggle.
With a mask, flame retardant bunker pants and coat, har nesses, self-rescue system and boots to wear, Smith said it’s nice when working inside a burning building “if someone helps you around a lot.” While heavy smoke still hung in the restaurant’s dining room, the earlier collapse over the kitchen had cleared out enough of the stuff to make the mission a little less daunting, he said.
Leading the crew inside and toward the back end of the kitchen’s fire, Allbritton was on hand to man a hand-held thermal imaging unit. The unit, he said, “pans the room and gives visibility through the roof.” As the team approached the restroom, which sat past the buffet bar and adjacent to the flaming kitchen, the nozzle was switched on and water began to plow the inside flames.
Under the direction of Capt. Travis Handy, units A and B, which were situated on the front and left side of the structure, practiced a similar method of assault from within.
As the work continued, the minutes flew by.
“Twenty minutes,” said Smith, “don’t feel like nothing.” By the time his team got to where they needed to be, it was already time, according to tactical procedures, for the team to exit and rehabilitate. Fresh backup crews entered both sides of the fight, taking the reins for the next 20 minutes.
“You get your hose to the fire and you rotate ... get in, get out, and follow the hose back out,” Smith said.
With time to spare at the rehabilitation tent, which had been erected in the restaurant’s parking lot, the teams are allowed time to refill their oxygen tanks, hydrate and rest. Once rehabbed, they’re ushered into a staging area before either heading back to their last assignments or being reas signed.
“We rotated on the hose lines for three or four crews. We’ll pull out, they’ll come in. It will be an interior attack and then we’ll rotate to a defensive attack several times,” Smith said, adding that two men sta tioned in the ladder truck also take turns dousing the fire from above.
Copyright 2008 Times-News