Neighbors reported that people were seen leaving the building near when the fire started, but officials hadn’t confirmed that by Thursday afternoon.
The scorched structure was so dangerous the city had to do an emergency demolition, which might hamper any future arson investigations, said Hamilton Fire Chief Mark Mercer.
“With the fire in there and the fact that it’s still hot, we can’t get a dog in there to look for anything,” Mercer said. “There are a couple things we have done on the front end. So we have a drone that we can fly through and it does 3-D modeling. We were able to complete that on the one side where we feel the fire started.
“That should capture everything that we’re able to capture. There’s certainly some things if we had the opportunity we’d love to do a full investigation, but the building is just going to be such a hazard that it’s something we can’t let it stand long enough for.”
The warehouse changed hands Tuesday for $200,000 from Capstone Financial in Irving, Texas to Coast Boulevard Associates in Glendale, Arizona, according to the county auditor’s website. The $14,433 tax bill has been paid on the building.
The new owner could not be reached for comment. Mercer said the city has reached out to that owner also.
Capstone bought the building from Blue Copper Holdings last November. The warehouse came on the tax rolls in 1985 valued at $750,000, and Hammermill Paper sold it to Hensley Properties for $450,000 in 2000. Hensley sold it to Blue Copper in 2015.
Neighbors woke up Thursday to the burning building and scrambled to protect themselves and nearby property. Barry Diangelo was up and filming the fire even before the fire department arrived.
“It was scary at night time because the clouds of smoke was billowing up, you could feel the heat,” he said.
He lives two blocks over and started knocking on his neighbors’ doors.
“I just started knocking on doors and they go like, ‘Who is it?’ Then they looked out the window and was like, ‘Oh my God!’ You could see the flames from our front porch,” he said.
Others tried to wake up neighbors and warn them about the danger.
“I heard yelling in the street and I got up and about that time they were banging on the door, (saying) ‘Get out it’s gonna blow,’” said Christi Kessel.
It was “beyond” scary, she said. She lost a house to a fire 10 years ago and “it was deja vu all over again, we thought we would lose everything.”
Candy Burns lives right across the street from warehouse.
“We got evacuated, I live right on the street right across,” she said. “They woke us up about 5:10 a.m., my daughter came downstairs and said, ‘We’ve got to get out in a hurry the building’s on fire.’
“We had to get our cars and by the time we got to them they were like so hot and we had to hurry up and get out of there. The cars probably would have not made it if we hadn’t gotten out when we did.”
Hamilton’s Executive Director of Public Safety Scott Scrimizzi said the building, which has been vacant for years, has been a hazard. The fire was so hot — 1,100 to 1,200 degrees, fire officials are estimating — because the building contained plastic molds and cardboard.
“Our fire prevention office has been in there … there was a business doing some stuff in there and we shut them down,” Scrimizzi said. “There’s been no activity there for quite some time. It’s always been for us a nuisance because of the lack of maintenance for the building, lack of maintenance for the sprinkler and alarm system, so we get a fair amount of fire alarms there.”
Scrimizzi said the city priced demolishing the building previously, and it would have cost about $500,000.
“I can tell you from flying over it, there’s hardly anything left in there, so it should be significantly less since there’s nothing left,” Scrimizzi said. “But it’s still going to be expensive, and then you have to talk about what restrictions the EPA puts on you because of asbestos and things like that.”
MORE: Chief: Massive Hamilton warehouse fire that caused evacuations is suspicious
Butler County Land Bank President Kathy Dudley said this fire is an example of why the county wants to move toward eradicating commercial and industrial blight.
“Clearly industrial and commercial properties that are located in largely residential areas, which is how used to have our industry, creates dangers to the residents close to it,” she said. “This is a good example of it… When you have people being evacuated because the heat from the structure fire is impacting their home, I would hope people feel compelled to act. This is something that needs to be addressed as a public policy concern.”
Neighbors near the fire who woke up to an inferno burning yards from their homes had to be evacuated.
Mercer said about 50 firefighters from Hamilton, Fairfield, Fairfield Twp., Monroe and West Chester Twp. battled the blaze. No firefighters or citizens were injured.
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