Fire Started

A stubborn fire that burned for hours yesterday morning destroyed two stores at Oldtown Mall, a struggling strip of retail outlets east of Baltimore's downtown that symbolizes failed urban revitalization.Wrecking crews knocked down the smoldering remains of a variety store and a hat shop in the heart of Oldtown Mall at lunchtime shortly after firefighters put out the smoky blaze that was first reported about 8: 15 a.m. The mall is near Ensor and Monument streets.The fire started in a four-story narrow brick rowhouse built at the turn of the century in the 500 block of Oldtown Mall, a part of Gay Street closed to traffic and turned into a red brick pedestrian thoroughfare.

The fire Wednesday in Northwest Baltimore that claimed the lives of five people -- three of them children -- is being investigated by city police as a possible arson.Fire officials classified the fire yesterday as incendiary, which means it was intentionally set. If the fire is ruled arson, the five deaths caused by it would become homicides.Officials ruled out as a possible cause the jury-rigged electrical and gas service in the Norwood Avenue house, where the power was cut off in July at the request of a family member.

Fires believed to be the result of arson caused $65,000 in damage yesterday morning to townhouses in Columbia and Ellicott City, officials said.In Long Reach, Columbia, three family members awoke to find their second floor engulfed in flames. Deputy State Fire Marshal W. Faron Taylor said the fire was set deliberately in several places in the townhouse in the 5400 block of Tilted Stone.Howard County firefighters said they confronted smoke billowing from second-floor windows and controlled the blaze in about 20 minutes.

A two-alarm fire in a Northeast Baltimore apartment complex yesterday left 31 people homeless and caused more than $170,000 in damage, said a Fire Department spokesman.The fire started about 12: 30 p.m. in a basement apartment at 4805 Lorelly Ave. at Lorelly Court Apartments and was caused by a child playing with matches, said Battalion Chief Hector L. Torres, the spokesman.At least eight people jumped from second- and third-floor windows at the 12-unit building to escape the fire, Torres said.

A January fire that destroyed a Northwest Baltimore house and killed five people was not the work of an arsonist, top police officials said yesterday after a meeting with the fire chief."

A raging three-alarm fire yesterday afternoon destroyed five rowhouses in Northwest Baltimore, sent five firefighters to the hospital and left 13 people homeless, a Fire Department spokesman said.It was the sixth multiple-alarm fire in the city in eight days.One firefighter suffered from hypertension, a second suffered a back injury and a third a minor burn as they battled the fire in the 4700 block of Delaware Ave. in Pimlico for nearly an hour, said Battalion Chief Hector L. Torres. Two firefighters also suffered heat exhaustion.

Firefighters quickly extinguished a fire in the insulation of a Harborplace restaurant last night without disrupting diners.Tony Boyers, general manager of Paolo's restaurant in the Light Street pavilion, said insulation in a heat exhaust duct between the roof and sub-roof overheated, sending flames and smoke into the sky but not into the restaurant.Boyers said about a dozen diners were in the restaurant when the fire started at 9 p.m.More than an hour later, a trace of smoke lingered in the restaurant, which remained open until its regular midnight closing time.

The cause of a five-alarm fire that destroyed Western Maryland College's Gill Gym last month remains undetermined, state fire marshals said yesterday."

Baltimore Housing Authority officials are investigating reports that a disabled 58-year-old man who died in a fire in his Lake View Towers apartment Friday night may have been drinking when he apparently ignited his couch with a cigarette.Rudolph Walker died of smoke inhalation before Baltimore firefighters knocked down the door of his 11th-floor apartment in the 700 block of Druid Park Lake Drive about 10:50 p.m.Residents of the building for low-income elderly people told fire investigators that Mr. Walker had fallen earlier Friday and may have been drinking.

Ten hours after the fire started at the Hollins Street Exchange yesterday, the smoke lingered up a trash-strewn block of Hollins Street over Adell Redden's gardens of collard greens and sweet potatoes.The former president of Boyd-Booth Concerned Citizens Inc. had been up all night at her house, two blocks from the 11-alarm fire, where she listened to sirens and watched the flames and smoke.By morning, two homeless men knocked on her door for breakfast.They had been living in the vacant building where the fire started, then spread across the street and destroyed the seven-story, brick Hollins Street Exchange, where artists, furniture makers and musicians worked and lived.

A two-alarm fire damaged two apartments in a Baltimore County building complex yesterday morning and sent one occupant to a hospital to be treated for smoke inhalation, according to a fire official. The blaze was first reported about 5:45 a.m. in a third-story apartment at the Kenilworth at Charles Apartments in the 1100 block of Donington Circle, between Joppa Road and the Baltimore Beltway, west of Towson. The fire started on a kitchen stove in an unattended pan of cooking oil, fire officials said.

Robert Gray and his fiancee returned yesterday to survey the damage from the fire that tore through their apartment complex near Woodlawn, a four-alarm blaze that left them without a place to live and that officials said was started by accident. Looking up at his apartment, Gray recounted all the things he lost: a fluffy cat named Jasmine; a collection of five guitars; sails for his 19-foot boat, which had been in the parking lot of the Queens Ridge Apartments on Giard Drive. "It's just so unbelievable," said Gray, 48, a welder-fabricator.

CHARLESTON, S.C. -- The furniture store blaze that killed nine firefighters last week started in an enclosed loading dock, federal investigators said yesterday. A Sofa Super Store employee told the Associated Press that the area was used for smoke breaks. The Charlotte Observer reported Friday that the structure that enclosed the loading dock at the showroom and warehouse complex on Savannah Highway was built without a building permit sometime in the past nine years. The announcement yesterday by Special Agent Ken Chisholm of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives ends the on-scene investigation for the agency, which is also trying to find the cause of the fire and piece together events that led to the deaths Monday evening.

Four townhouses in Eldersburg were heavily damaged yesterday afternoon in a three-alarm fire, authorities said. Seven residents - five adults and two young children - were displaced, but no one was injured, said Bill Rehkopf, public information officer for the Sykesville-Freedom District Fire Department. Firefighters rescued a cocker spaniel and a cat from one home, he said. Heavy smoke was coming from the rear and roof of adjacent houses at 1102 and 1104 Pennywort Circle when firefighters arrived about 1:30 p.m., Rehkopf said.

I arrived at the site of the fire just before noon on Jan. 18, 2007. The blaze had swept through the 100-year-old house less than two hours before. But now the flames had been extinguished, and so had the lives of five people: two grandparents ages 72 and 47, and three of their grandchildren, ages 3, 4 and 9 months. Photographing the ordered chaos of the scene on Philadelphia Road in Abingdon, talking to deputy fire marshals and transmitting pictures in the damp cold, kept me so preoccupied that the emotional reality of the deaths didn't hit me until many hours later.

The West Baltimore rowhouse fire that claimed the lives of two men last month was caused by a candle, said Chief Theodore Saunders, the city fire marshal. Robert Hunt and Ernest Hickman died in the blaze. Two women were injured. Both were treated at hospitals. The fire started about 4 a.m. while 10 people were sleeping in the house in the 1900 block of E. Hoffman St. The home had not been served by BGE for a decade.

A two-alarm fire heavily damaged two Southwest Baltimore rowhouses and forced out 24 residents of a treatment program for drug addicts, city fire officials reported. The fire broke out about 10 a.m. in a vacant house in the 2200 block of Sidney Ave. and quickly spread to an adjacent house used as a residential treatment center. Two other houses used by the drug program sustained smoke and water damage. Frank Hazzard, a battalion chief for the Baltimore Fire Department, said no injuries were reported and that the cause of the fire was being investigated.

Three Washington County teenagers died in a fire early yesterday that destroyed much of a nearly 200-year-old house in Western Maryland. The victims were at the home of a friend, said a spokesman for the fire marshal's office. The names of the dead were withheld pending confirmation of their identities, said Joseph Zurola, a deputy state fire marshal. Autopsies are scheduled today. Damage was estimated at $100,000. The house had smoke detectors, said Zurola. The fire, reported at 5:15 a.m., began on the second floor of a stone house built in the late 1800s on Mount Hebron Road in Keedysville.

Robert H. Eades, an Annapolis community activist, pledged yesterday to rebuild his home after it was almost completely destroyed in a fire Sunday. "I'm going to see what it takes to rebuild," he said. "I lost everything." The Annapolis Fire Department responded to a call at Eades' home in the first block of Pleasant St. at 2:39 p.m., said Capt. Joseph Martin, a department spokesman. The fire spread to the houses on both sides of Eades' rowhouse, Martin said. The department put out the fire in 45 minutes, he said.

Fire swept through a two-story rowhouse in Brooklyn yesterday, killing a man who was trapped inside. The victim was believed to be a 31-year-old man, but city fire officials had not confirmed his identity late last night. The fire started on the ground floor at 1348 Patapsco Ave. about 2 p.m. and took about a half-hour for 50 city firefighters to bring under control. Two firefighters suffered minor steam burns and a third injured his foot, said city Fire Department spokesman Donald Heinbuch.