Charlotte’s Fire of the Century was deadly. It also could have been much worse

The flames shot into the sky in Charlotte’s South Park area Thursday morning, a hellish orange inferno blazing with 2,000-degree temperatures. It was a nightmare of a five-alarm fire, so intense that two men who have fought nightmares for years said they had never seen anything like it.

“We haven’t had a fire like this in decades — if ever,“ Charlotte Fire Department chief Reginald Johnson said.

“I’ve been with the Charlotte Mecklenburg Police Department for 31 years and I’ve never, ever seen a fire of this magnitude,” Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department Chief Johnny Jennings said. “... Not even close. It’s a once-in-a-career thing.”

Charlotte’s fire of the century killed two people.

It scared — and scarred — many more.

But it could have been much, much worse.

A pleasant May day shouldn’t ever be interrupted for an actual call of “Mayday!” But that’s what happened Thursday morning as some of the 90 firefighters who responded tried to rescue close to 20 construction workers trapped in the shell of an under-construction apartment building, which went up in flames after a spray-foam insulation trailer on the ground floor of the building accidentally caught fire sometime around 9 a.m.

The fire fed on stacks of wood at the construction site and, almost immediately, grew out of control.

Fifteen construction workers were rescued by firefighters. Two men working on the building — Demonte Tyree Sherrill and Rueben Holmes — were killed, according to their supervisor.

Firefighters tried to rescue Sherrill, 30, and Holmes, 58. A man who appears to be Sherrill went on Facebook Live at 9:20 a.m. for one minute, recording a 61-second video on his phone alongside another unidentified man and pleading for aid. The two men yelled for help and tried to shield their faces from the thick smoke.

“I’m at South Park right now, at work in a building on fire, and I can’t get out,” the man said. “It’s getting harder and harder for them to see us. The building’s on fire. I’m trapped inside — me and my man.”

But the firefighters couldn’t get to the two workers as the heavy smoke made vision nearly impossible.

“They were going by sound,” Johnson said of his firefighters.

Ultimately, the firefighters couldn’t rescue the men, had to radio in a “mayday” and then had to be rescued themselves.

Holmes called his boss Keith Suggs for the last time at around 9 a.m. Thursday from the site of the unfinished apartment building, where he had been installing windows and doors for the past month.

“He told me he was on the sixth floor, the building was on fire, and he couldn’t get out,” Suggs told The Charlotte Observer in a phone interview Friday.

It’s a heart-wrenching story. All of it.

“We’re talking about two lives lost, which we express our sympathies for,” CFD chief Johnson said. “We could have also had three to four firefighters who perished in there, if not more than that.”

Instead, no firefighting personnel was hurt, Johnson said.

The firefighters also managed to keep the fire from hopping to other buildings, or from melting an enormous crane that could have collapsed itself and caused more devastation. One of the people rescued was the crane’s operator, who was stranded 160 feet in the air for more than an hour.

Numerous other nearby buildings in the South Park area also were under threat of serious fire.

“Charlotte Fire Department was able to keep it to that one building,” Johnson said. “There was a twin building, literally on the other side of Ladder 2 that started to catch fire, but we were able to extinguish that. There were seven other buildings that the embers coming from the fire actually started some roof fires. So we did have several other incidents that we had to take on, along with this five-alarm fire, just to make sure that we didn’t have any other significant incidents occurring.”

Was it a perfect response by everyone in authority?

Undoubtedly, it was not. Responses in chaotic situations like this one never are.

“We all try to play Monday morning quarterback on what we could have done and should have done,” Johnson said. “But I’m telling you … everyone did the best they could.”

Johnson noted in a press conference Friday that unfinished construction sites such as the one that burned Thursday are more susceptible to fires than finished ones.

“This is the new pedestal style construction where your first two floors are basically cement or masonry, and then your top floors are wood,” Johnson said. “A lot of the structures that are built now — not just here in Charlotte but all over the country — are built in this (way). Once they are completely dry-walled and the sprinkler systems installed, obviously they’re much safer than they are during construction, where it’s a lot more open.”

As one of the fastest-growing cities in America, Charlotte has been partially defined by construction and cranes for years. Sometimes you can count a dozen cranes or more in and around uptown.

The issue of construction safety was at the forefront already due to a Jan. 2 accident, when three construction workers died and two others were injured when scaffolding they were on collapsed at a site near uptown Charlotte.

But while that horrible accident happened so quickly that hardly anyone saw it, the drama of the fire unfolded for hours on Thursday.

Hundreds of people were displaced and watching from the streets or stuck in traffic jams created by the roadblocks near SouthPark Mall. With the breeze and the conflagration, the nearby buildings and the high-risk rescues, this had all the makings of a large-scale disaster.

And for two families, it absolutely was that. Let’s never minimize their loss.

But for the city of Charlotte as a whole, the fire of the century could have been far more dreadful in ways that are hard to even contemplate.

The families of Sherrill and Holmes deserve our prayers and our help.

The firefighters deserve our everlasting thanks.