Scott Fowler: Fire at Lake Norman community left behind a torched club and a family vowing to rebuild

Oct. 16--DENVER -- At 4 a.m. on Oct. 9, a sheriff's deputy pounded on a door in Lincoln County. He woke up every occupant of the house, including the family dog, Cooper.

The knocking -- and Cooper's barking -- roused Willie Dann, who along with his wife, Robin, owned both the house and the nearby Westport swim and tennis club.

The tennis club was their family business. The Danns had moved cross-country seven years ago, from Denver, Colo., to Denver, N.C., to buy it, fulfilling a dream they had first conjured up on their first date.

"Are you Willie Dann?" asked the deputy.

"Yes," Dann said, bewildered and a little scared.

"Come with me," the deputy said. "Your tennis club has burned down to the bricks."

At the top of the stairs were the two Dann children -- 11-year-old Sidney and 8-year-old Will, fixtures at the club's junior tennis clinics. They heard the news and started bawling.

Dann followed the deputy the two miles to the club and found out the officer hadn't been exaggerating.

"By the time I got there," Dann said, "it was an inferno."

No one was inside the club. No one was hurt in the blaze. Most of the Westport community -- located on the west side of Lake Norman -- slept through the entire incident. The fire trucks didn't need to run their sirens to get there because no one was on the road.

Well, not quite no one.

'Roman candles on the Fourth of July'

Ross Bulla, who had volunteered for the fire and rescue departments in Mecklenburg and Lincoln counties for 25 years earlier in his life, couldn't sleep at 3 a.m. He decided he'd go into the office early.

Bulla lives in the Westport community, about five minutes from the tennis club. He saw the characteristic orange glow of a building on fire at night when he walked outside. He jumped in his car, wanting to find the flames and see if it had been reported. He pulled up to Westport at the same time as the first of numerous fire trucks -- someone had already called "911."

"The tennis club is on elevated ground, and so as soon as I turned into the Westport community, it looked like a mountain on fire," Bulla said. "By the time I got there, the roof was gone. There were huge embers shooting up into the sky and falling into the streets. It was like someone was shooting Roman candles on the Fourth of July. I've been to hundreds of fires, and I'd never seen anything that looked quite like that."

The 6,000-square-foot building was a total loss. The tennis courts were covered with ash and debris but escaped most of the fire's wrath. The nearby swimming pool was largely undamaged.

Later that morning, after the initial shock wore off, the Danns decided they would rebuild.

A fire, a 'thunderbolt'

An investigation by the Lincoln County Fire Marshal concluded days later that the fire didn't appear intentional and that it begun in a storage area under the club's wrap-around, second-story deck. It's unclear exactly what sparked the fire. A Lincoln County spokesman said there was no reason to believe the fire was suspicious in nature.

But it was unexpected.

Like all small-business owners, the Danns had worried about a lot of things in 2020.

"You worry about the plumbing, or getting new equipment, or updating the courts, or surviving COVID so we could open the pool," Dann said a few days later, surveying the wreckage. "There's a lot of things you're concerned about as a business owner. The club burning down really wasn't one of them."

The Westport tennis club was home to about 375 families from the Westport area -- it's independent of the nearby Westport Golf Club -- but it had a far wider reach than that.

Anyone could rent the large banquet room, whether they were a member. The local chamber of commerce met at the club. People got married there. A recreational swim team had summer meets there. Cotillion and yoga classes were held there. A yearly father-and-daughter dance was held there. There were kids' birthday parties at the large pool, well-known among the local children for its two spiraling waterslides.

Originally opened in 2009, the club was first owned by Robbie, Pattie and Tyler Smith, local tennis entrepreneurs who at one point owned three tennis clubs in the greater Charlotte area. Ready to downsize, they sold the Westport club to the Danns in 2013, but the two families remained friends.

"When I heard Westport burned," Robbie Smith said, "it was like a thunderbolt to my heart."

A personal Westport connection

Full disclosure: I'm an interested observer in what happens to the Westport tennis club, because I belong to it. I've lived in Denver in eastern Lincoln County -- 21 miles northwest of uptown Charlotte -- since 1997. Our family joined the club when it first opened and pays $117 per month for a family membership.

I play tennis myself there regularly. And for the past 10 years I have been an unpaid volunteer coach for the Lincoln Charter high school boys' tennis team that uses the club as its home base. I coached two of my sons on high school teams there, and watching them play doubles together in a few high school matches is one of my fondest memories.

Dann, 49, is an international-level player in his age group. He and I have also played together on several 40-and-over adult tennis teams based out of the club, one of which won a national championship.

My roots are threaded deeply into the Westport swim and tennis club, enough so that I was scheduled to play tennis there on the same day as the fire. The guy I was supposed to play texted me early that morning with the best excuse I've ever gotten from someone who had to cancel a match.

"No tennis," he wrote. "Club just burned down."

Dann hopes to get all eight courts up and running by the end of October. Building a new clubhouse, though, will likely take a year.

"We're going to put Humpty Dumpty back together again," he said. "We didn't move our whole family across the country just to quit when it got hard."

For the Danns, the next year or so will be an all-encompassing rebuilding effort. They had insurance, but there are still so many questions to answer.

When can the rest of the club -- now a hodgepodge of burned-out beams and black ash -- be demolished? What should the new clubhouse look like? How can they most efficiently get the club's well-liked tennis pros working again? And how can they thank the hundreds of people who have reached out since the fire, offering cleanup, casseroles and the other things that Southerners offer when confronted with a crisis?

"The community has been great to us," Robin Dann said. "The fire departments were great. And we're trying to make lists, call people and get it going again. We're focusing on the positive. No one got hurt. And we can rebuild it."

Kind of a funny story

As for Bulla, once he realized the fire department was already in place that morning, he took out his camera. His early response to the fire netted some remarkable photos and videos of the night the club burned down. But he also had to deal with his own unexpected visitors later that day.

"Thousands of gallons of water were used to douse that fire," Bulla said. "And my car got blocked in by the fire truck, so it was there for several hours."

His car was parked on lower elevation than the club, and the water that flooded the mulch and dirt surrounding the club sent a battalion of small creatures hurtling downstream, desperate to grab onto anything stable. A number of them latched onto the tires of Bulla's car and started working their way up.

As Bulla made a phone call from inside his car later that morning, a cockroach scurried across his arm. Then he saw another. And another.

"I eventually had to get my car treated for a cockroach infestation," Bulla said. "It's kind of a funny story now, but wasn't so funny at the time."

Eventually, the Danns know that the clubhouse will be rebuilt and the fire will fade into memory. For now, though, they are concentrating on rebuilding. Their club made all the local newscasts in Charlotte for a single day, as Bulla's photos and videos were beamed everywhere.

Now the cameras are gone. But the work remains.

A club burned to the bricks will be rebuilt, one brick at a time.

___

(c)2020 The Charlotte Observer (Charlotte, N.C.)

Visit The Charlotte Observer (Charlotte, N.C.) at www.charlotteobserver.com

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.