Mayor: One family lost everything in massive Surf City fire

SURF CITY, NC (WWAY) — It has been two days since the massive Surf City fire and the scene is still active.

“Anytime you have a fire it’s a disaster to somebody especially when you have families there,” Mayor Doug Medlin said.

Atkinson Road, the street of the accident, is a dead-end road so the homes well past the seven that were a complete loss are still intact. Their power was restored Tuesday afternoon.

“Where it started, they couldn’t get by that to fight from the other side so they were just fighting one side of the fire, ” Medlin said. “The wind was blowing the fire the other way so it just kept on going without getting to the other side of it.”

Medlin says one of the seven destroyed homes was the full-time residence of a family of 5. He says one of the family members is a talented student at Topsail High School. He says the other homes were secondary homes for families.

He says the town has not seen a fire like this since the 2013 Tiffany Motel fire.

WWAY spoke with the mother of that family, who did not want to be identified, and says her family had just returned to their home since Hurricane Florence. In this conversation, the mother held tightly to an elementary school photo of one of her sons that crews were able to recover.

“You’ve got people that have lost everything,” Chad Merritt, Streets and Maintenance Director said.

“This is one of the largest fires in Surf City in some time,” Fire Chief Allen Wilson said. 

Wilson says, after a joint investigation with numerous departments, the cause of Sunday’s massive fire is undetermined.

“Crews had pulled up and started to deploy…to start to cool that fire down and they actually quickly had to quickly retreat because it was getting too hot for them,” Wilson said. 

Wilson says the one-way entry did pose quite a challenge.

“Coming from the beach side to the waterway that’s the dead end and the way these flames were traveling were towards the north which is towards the dead end and as they crossed the road, there was no other way to get to the end of the road and we couldn’t drive through the fire so we had to stop before the fire and do the best we could,” Wilson said.

Wilson says the 8 single story homes were closely spaced together, but they did meet the building code.

He says the massive explosion caught on camera was due to a failed LP gas tank that was used to fuel gas appliances like a gas stove.

“We went in later to find that LP tank because we wanted to see …what allowed it to explode like that and it is that it fell over,” Wilson said.

Now, clean up begins. The town is bringing in crews to clean up the scattered debris.

“For us it’s trying to get that sense of normalcy back as quickly as possible,” Merritt said.