A look back at the response to the Highway 31 fire in Myrtle Beach

Some of the residents of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina who lost their homes in the Highway 31 fire on April 23 are asking questions about the evacuation procedures during the fire. The main issues are very short notice, or no notice, to evacuate and the fact that the phone number to which residents were directed for up to date information was wrong.

Here is an excerpt from the TheSunNew.com:

Sherry Martin remembers the exact time her husband woke her in the early morning of April 23 – it was 1:53 a.m.

“He said he kept hearing something hitting the roof, and then we smelled smoke,” Martin said. “We went to the sunroom in the back of the house and looked outside and it was literally raining fire.”

Just 10 minutes later, Martin and her husband had fled their burning home at 5815 Bridlewood Road in Barefoot Resort.

“The heat was so intense you couldn’t blink your eyes … you couldn’t speak because your lips were plastered to your teeth,” she said. “Confusion was beginning to set in. Our home’s roof fell in, and the house was fully engulfed by the time we left the driveway.”

Now, more than a month later, Martin still tears up as she surveys the empty lot where her home used to stand. A cancer survivor, Martin said she has overcome adversity in the past and will again.

“Still, I want time to heal,” she said.

Martin – along with a growing number of Barefoot Resort residents – also wants some answers.

She and others say they don’t understand why a wildfire that had been raging for most of the previous day caught public safety officials by surprise – giving residents just minutes to escape in the middle of the night, grabbing whatever they could on their way out the door.

“It sickens me to read how they evacuated everyone and had no time to warn us,” she said. “Do people not understand that some of us almost lost our lives that night?”

Police car videos of that night show North Myrtle Beach officials feared the wildfire would hit Barefoot Resort more than 30 minutes before the first house caught fire. The police had been monitoring the fire’s movement for hours before that.

However, an evacuation was not called for until after it was too late to save the 76 homes that were destroyed – in addition to 78 more that were damaged – in one of the city’s largest residential developments.

Public safety officials now say the fire was too unpredictable and flared too quickly to predict the disaster at Barefoot Resort.

City officials also say they were given a false sense of security because Horry County Fire Rescue assured them earlier that night that the fire was contained – an assertion denied by the county’s fire chief but backed up by a report filed by the fire chief in Myrtle Beach, who says the county told him the same thing.

Paul Whitten, the county’s director of public safety, said the S.C. Forestry Commission – which was working with the county to fight the fire – is the only agency that could have made that call.

“Horry County is not in the business of telling forestry how to fight fires,” he said.

The police videos, 911 telephone calls and emergency radio traffic document a chaotic evacuation – homes ablaze, residents confused about what to do and where to go and firefighters ordered not to save burning structures because the area was too dangerous.

Some residents in Barefoot Resort and along adjacent Water Tower Road now say the people entrusted with their safety dropped the ball by failing to evacuate the neighborhoods earlier.

“Someone failed to do their job,” said Barefoot Resort resident Mike Ragusa. “There’s a tremendous fire coming our way – why wasn’t an evacuation plan prepared?”

Residents say the failure to react could have cost lives but, only by a miracle, no one was hurt or killed. The confusion as fire bore down on the city’s homes, however, helped lead to the destruction of $19 million worth of homes and lives’ worth of memories.