Vacant home fire in Chesapeake likely intentionally set

May 07--Neighbors and firefighters are frustrated after a Chesapeake home that had been vacant for two years caught fire Tuesday afternoon and damaged an adjacent home.

Chesapeake volunteer firefighters were dispatched to 12953 Ohio Ave. just after noon Tuesday. The home was fully engulfed when they arrived.

The home has been abandoned since 2012, when the renters accidentally caught the home on fire, Fire Chief Steve Johnson said. Since then, the home has fallen into disrepair, and the owners, who now live out-of-state, have not attended to it.

"It's a suspicious fire because there are no utilities, so someone had to set it," Johnson said.

The home across the street suffered exterior damage from the heat. Jeff Brown, the owner of the home, estimated repairs to the siding will cost $1,500 to $2,500.

Rail traffic was halted on CSX's tracks during the blaze because firefighters had to run their hose across the tracks to a fire hydrant beside W.Va. 61.

Brown was down the street helping a neighbor with a sewer problem when he heard the crackling of the blaze. He ran home to check on his 92-year-old mother, who lives with him. She was okay.

Brown's mother, and his uncle, who lives next door, sat on the front porch of Brown's home and watched firefighters control the blaze.

Brown said the home has been a problem in the making ever since it was abandoned. The decaying structure drew cockroaches, mice and copperhead snakes. Thieves ransacked the home for copper wiring. Brown described it as "an incident waiting to happen."

"It's been sitting like this, drying out and getting more and more dangerous," Brown said. "Kids have been going in and out of it since it was abandoned. The individual landowner continued to pay property tax on it, so we have no recourse as far as getting it listed as an abandoned property, because since they still pay property taxes on it, it's still a structure they consider worth selling."

Brown said he contacted the Kanawha-Charleston Health Department and has attended town council meetings to get something done about the home. No one did anything about it.

The VFD contacted the owners after the 2012 fire, and they advised that they would take care of it, "but that hasn't happened, and we don't have no authority to enforce anything," Johnson said.

Brown said the homeowners don't have insurance on the structure, which leaves him to foot the bill for the damages to his home. His calls to the owners, who he said now live in Ohio, went unanswered.

Johnson said while it is fortunate there were no other homes immediately adjacent to the one that burned, there are many other abandoned structures in Chesapeake that pose similar risks. In fact, a home that has been abandoned for about a year sits just feet away from Brown's elderly uncle's home, and at first, Johnson thought that was the structure that had caught fire when he first got the call.

Such structures are "an eyesore and a danger to the community," Johnson said.

"What we're concerned with is it could endanger firefighters trying to fight it," Johnson said. "With it setting empty for two years, it's more than likely the floors are rotted out, and we're not going to risk our guys to go in there and fight it. This is something the county, the city, the state, whoever is responsible should have done cleaned it up. It was reported to them when it burnt in 2012."

The Chesapeake Police Department is investigating the cause of the blaze.

Contact writer Marcus Constantino at 304-348-1796 or [email protected]. Follow him at www.twitter.com/amtino.

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