Over the years, Eva Brown has watched neighbors on North Calhoun Street move out or die off, leaving their homes to fall slowly into disrepair, with windows boarded and foundations crumbling.
In September, living among abandoned houses cost Brown the roof over her head when fire swept through the vacant buildings on her block. More than 100 firefighters, some coming from Washington for the first time since the Great Baltimore Fire of 1904, arrived to battle the spreading flames.
"I'm out of my home because of something that happened across the street," said Brown, 73, who, along with her 76-year-old cousin, Esther Ausby, is the last remaining resident in a strip of houses.
The Sept. 8 blaze illustrates a hazard that Fire Chief James S. Clack says is endemic to Baltimore: empty buildings close together that often abut inhabited homes.
"It's a big concern," Clack said. "I'm a big proponent in taking down buildings."
The city's housing department reports about 16,000 empty buildings in Baltimore, of which the city owns about 4,000. The Fire Department reported 230 vacant-structure fires during the 12-month period that ended June 30, which amounted to about 15 percent of all structure fires.
That was a sharp increase over the 131 vacant-structure fires reported the previous year. Nationally, fires in vacant structures make up just 6 percent of all structure fires, according to 2006 figures from the National Fire Protection Association.
"We have a huge problem in Baltimore," said Stephan G. Fugate, president of the city fire officers' union. "The population peaked out in the early 1970s and then decreased, but that population decrease … cannot be extrapolated to mean that we have one-third less exposure to fire."
The city is poised to unveil a new plan in the coming weeks to expedite the sale of vacant properties. The Fire Department is planning to begin tagging dangerous vacant buildings next year to warn firefighters, but Clack says the city ultimately must demolish the structures.
Housing officials track a list of properties that pose a risk to public safety and demolish those that are an imminent threat, said department spokeswoman Cheron Porter. Demolishing a rowhouse can cost anywhere from $13,000 to $60,000, Porter said. Even by conservative estimates, it would cost more than $250 million to demolish all of the city's vacant structures.
The cash-strapped city simply does not have the money to raze all the vacant buildings, Porter said. And, when vacants are surrounded by inhabited homes, it is often best to leave them standing.
"Demolition is not the only strategy or the best strategy depending on the block and the neighborhood," she said. "Ideally, you want a taxpayer homeowner in there."
Until then, firefighters are frequently called upon to deal with the problem. When confronted with a blaze in an empty building, Clack says, firefighters still must treat it as if it were occupied, because there often is a homeless person or someone else inside.
"They get into these structures and set up shop," he said.
Because Baltimore's rowhouses are densely packed, the department sends about twice as many firefighters to an alarm than other cities, Clack said. Separate units are sent to the front and back of a rowhouse because it is often difficult for one unit to effectively attack a fire in a building in the middle of a long grouping.
Another challenge: Budget challenges have led city officials to close one firehouse, and three companies are shut down each day as part of rotating closures.
"We have to end rotating closures so we can have more insurance," Clack said.
Last month's fire spread quickly to nearly a dozen empty dwellings on both sides of North Calhoun Street, two separate but simultaneous four-alarm blazes. Another fire burned out several more abandoned dwellings a block away at the same time.
"We exhausted the resources of Baltimore City that night," said Fugate, the officers union president. He said blocks of homes were "exposed" that night because the department did not have adequate resources.
Nearly a third of the shift's manpower responded to the fire, which was reported about 5:30 p.m. The city firefighters were joined by more than 20 trucks and engines from Anne Arundel, Baltimore, Harford and Howard counties, along with three fire companies from Washington, to replace apparatus that had been put out of service as part of the rotating closures.
Fire officials said it was the largest call for outside help to fight a fire since the 1904 fire that destroyed nearly all of downtown Baltimore. Then, Washington's firefighters used trains to reach the city.
"The city was pretty much left open the other night," said Bob Sledgeski, president of the firefighters union. "What bothers us is that you're using resources and there sometimes isn't resources left, when years ago there was enough resources."
