Fire Rescue News - Victims lost home, possessions in Atlantic City fire
By DEREK HARPER Staff Writer | Posted: Tuesday, August 31, 2010
EGG HARBOR TOWNSHIP - Several days after a devastating fire burned through a rooming house in Atlantic City, displaced residents are wondering what to do next.
Since the fire, 35 adults and seven children have been staying at.....Continue Reading
the Days Hotel on Tilton Road in Egg Harbor Township. They have a maximum of 28 days to find housing, said Pamela Grites, executive director of the Southern Shore Chapter of the American Red Cross. Not one person has moved out of the hotel since the fire.
"We're doing good," Kevin Baker, 55, said Tuesday, adding that the Red Cross gave people $160 to buy some clothes and personal effects.
The hotel is one of several across the region contracted by the Red Cross to house people temporarily displaced because of natural disasters, Grites said. The local chapter, which includes Atlantic, Cape May and Cumberland counties, housed 795 people between July 1, 2009, and June 30, Grites said.
However, while Baker said Red Cross staffers told him and others they could stay just seven days, Grites told The Press the people displaced in Atlantic City could stay 28 days at the hotel.
Keith Clack, 34, said he wondered about what he would do now. He was last employed two years ago at A.C. Linen. And now, he said, his wife is having his second child in late December.
"Right now we're just sitting down here wondering" about what's next, he said. Much of his clothes, as well as most of the things people have given him for the imminent arrival, were saturated in smoke.
Baker and others congratulated Clack on helping firefighters find people who had been trapped inside the building.
"He was courageous as hell," Baker said, "because I wouldn't have went up back in the smoke."
The fire started at about 11:45 p.m. Saturday in a rooming house on the 1400 block of Memorial Avenue, off South Tennessee Avenue, wedged between a Chinese restaurant and a parking garage and behind St. Nicholas of Tolentine church. Officials said they believe it was caused by a hot plate that was used by a second-floor resident who fell asleep.
The three-story building had 16 separate rooming units, connected by narrow hallways.
All of the residents safely escaped the flames. Resort firefighter Robert D. Gragg was hospitalized with significant smoke inhalation, but was later released.
Other former rooming house residents, Vankelly Ford, 21, and her roommate/business partner Lovetta Thorn, 19, were asleep in their apartment when the fire started.
Ford said smoke, billowing out of the building and pulled in by her window fan, woke her up. With the smoke filling the apartment, she woke up her roommate. She looked for a friend, Tyrell Monroe, 18, but he was already out of the building, having left to visit the Boardwalk earlier that night.
Concerned about the children in the building, she looked until Clack said he had it taken care of.
In the end, Ford, Thorn and Monroe lost practically everything, they said, including clothes and equipment for their music and entertainment production company One Maniac Entertainment. Just a microphone and a Bible sitting on a heater remained untouched, Ford said Tuesday, wearing a donated T-shirt and jeans.
Thorn, wearing an oversized blue-and-white-camouflage patterned shirt as a dress, said they now rely on a bus to get them back and forth between appointments in Atlantic City.
Monroe still wore the dark jeans and a shirt featuring Donald Duck in a hip-hop pose when he left to stroll the Boardwalk. He was hoping his mother in Virginia would send help, but like others, he was going to do what he could with what he had.
"I don't have a job or nothing," he said, "so I gotta do something quick."
Contact Derek Harper:
609-272-7046
