The fire demolished the 406 Muldee St. warehouse, which housed two businesses, and briefly spread to a few wooded areas and residential lawns nearby, fire officials and residents said.
It also prompted the early dismissal of classes at the Fellowship Baptist Academy, 515 Southerland St., where a fire alarm sounded around 11:50 p.m. because of smoke filtering into the church.
One side of the building stored the Christmas decorations for Crabtree Valley Mall in Raleigh, Durham Fire Batallion Chief Scott Roberts said. Fire officials received the call at 11:46 a.m., Roberts said. They arrived to find Shred All, which does confidential shredding of documents, and S-Link, a storage facility for used computers, engulfed in flames.
The Shred All business had pallets of paper stacked 4 feet high, Roberts said, which provided fuel for the blaze. The building also lacked a sprinkler system, which compounded the problem, he said. "Obviously, once it got started -- the amount of fuel versus the amount of water we had to put it out -- the fuel outweighed the water," Roberts said.
When the roof of the white building partially collapsed, firefighters backed off and used buckets at the top of ladder trucks to fight the blaze from above on the front and the back of the building, a rare occurrence, Roberts conceded. "It's not usually a good sign when the ladder truck is up spraying water," he said. About 30 firefighters from Durham and Bethesda Volunteer fire departments helped vent the building by cutting holes along its sides. Jerry Gentry, a co-owner of Shred All, said he tried to use a fire extinguisher on the fire but soon realized he was overmatched. The business employs 15 people, all of whom got out safely, and there were no workers in the S-Link building.
"The whole thing was less than two minutes before it started burning through the ceiling," said his wife Diane Gentry. The couple moved their business into the building on Labor Day weekend, they said. Tammy Moles, who lives with her husband just behind the warehouse at 424 Southerland St., said the flames briefly caught her neighbor's yard on fire and also ignited a wooded area nearby. "It flamed up so bad that you couldn't even see the church," Moles said. "I was thinking, 'Are they ever going to be able to put it out?' " Durham Fire Investigator Ron Rogers, who still was trying to get inside the building around 6:30 p.m. Thursday to start hunting for the fire's origin, confirmed it briefly had spread to other locations. "It did spread to a couple of wooded areas," Rogers said. "But I have not heard of any other property damage other than the burning of the ground." The smoke swelled hundreds of feet into the air and was visible from miles away. From the church's parking lot, the smoke was dense enough to blot out the sun.
Kim Cook said she was driving to Durham on her lunch break from Wake Health Services in Raleigh when she noticed the smoke from the intersection of Interstate 540 and U.S. 70. "It was just a big line of smoke going that way," Cook said, pointing to the northeast. "Everyone was looking at it." Motorists on U.S. 70 slowed nearly to a standstill as drivers gawked at the fire, and Durham police blocked both ends of Muldee Street to keep traffic away. About 30 minutes after the fire started, students from kindergarten through 12th grade filed out the eastern side of the Fellowship Baptist Academy. Some of the younger children cried, while others seemed excited. They returned to class about 10 minutes later. Principal Paul Moolenaar said school officials evacuated the school when the fire alarm began ringing. "Around 1:30 [p.m.], the smoke got so bad and we just started smelling it a lot stronger," he said. "We moved everyone to the gymnasium [a separate building] because of the fire."
