On Sept. 8, two simultaneous 4-alarm fires raced through a single block on Calhoun Street, wrecking rowhouses on both sides of and adding more blight and abandoned buildings to Baltimore's wasteland.
There are 16,000 empty buildings in Baltimore, 10,000 of them owned by the city (photos by The Sun's Jed Kirschbaum). It's complicated and time-consuming for city officials to get their hands on abandon properties and then turn them into viable living spaces, though officials are poised to announce a new plan to speed up the process.
The Sun's Jessica Anderson reports today from Calhoun Street, a block devastated by the arson fires but also still inhabited by people like Eva Brown, who watched firefighters struggle for hours to put out the flames and save the rowhouse in which she raised her children.
Meanwhile, firefighters in a department already taxed by budget cuts and rotating company closures, face a daunting task battling fires in vacant buildings, which account for about 15 percent of burning structures.
On the Sept. 8 fire, the Fire Department had to call for help from several surrounding counties and the chief in Washington sent trucks racing up I-95 as well to help Baltimore in what became the largest call-up of outside firefighters since the Great Fire of 1904.
"We exhausted the resources of Baltimore City that night," Capt. Stephan G. Fugate, the officers union president, told Anderson. He said blocks of homes were "exposed" that night because the department did not have adequate resources.
The story combines several city ills -- ugly blight and how the city struggles to erase it from its landscape; a fire department strapped for cash and unable to cope with two large fires; and the residents and homeowners who have to live next to these unsafe fire-traps.