By Jeff Lehr
Globe Staff Writer
JOPLIN, Mo. —
Her phone started ringing, followed by a noise of uncertain origin outside her apartment.
That’s how the sleep of 28-year-old Sylvia Moran was dispelled in the nick of time Monday morning. Moran got up, looked out a window and saw smoke.
“I tried to go out the front door, but I couldn’t because there was fire all over,” the occupant of the Oxford Park II Apartments in Joplin recalled minutes later.
Moran used a chair to break out a bedroom window in her first-floor apartment in Building C and crawl to safety. She suffered some scratches on shards of broken window glass, and hot, dripping tar from the burning roof splattered her arms as she made her escape.
The experience left the young mother of four shaken but grateful.
Moran, a night-shift worker who went back to bed after getting her children off to school earlier in the morning, may have had the closest call of any when a fire that started shortly before 10:45 a.m. ripped through her building at the complex in the 3400 block of South Texas Avenue and spread to Building B to the north.
The blaze destroyed the building in which Moran lived and may have destroyed Building B as well before the Joplin Fire Department was able to get it under control and knocked down with the help of Duenweg and Redings Mill firefighters.
To many who witnessed the spectacle, it seemed a miracle that no one was killed. Only Moran and one other unidentified occupant of the two buildings suffered any kind of injury at all, and neither of them required transport by ambulance, according to city officials.
Two police officers who responded to the scene and helped get occupants out suffered some minor smoke inhalation. One of them was taken to a hospital.
Pounding on doors
Besides the quick responses of firefighters and police, apartment complex staff members and employees of the National Health Care nursing home next door were being credited with spotting the fire and raising the alarm among tenants.
NHC employee Pam Girdner said she and others were taking a break behind the nursing home when they saw flames coming from a breezeway at the west end of Building C.
“We ran around the fence (between the two properties) and started pounding on doors, trying to get everybody out,” Girdner said.
She said the whole top floor of Building C was on fire by the time they made it around the fence to the complex.
Victoria Moss, manager of the complex, heard some yelling about the same time and emerged from an office building to the east of Building C. Moss said she initially thought some sort of fight was going on. But when she looked around the building, she saw the flames on the west end. She and other apartment complex employees began knocking on doors and getting people out.
Moss said there were 18 apartments in each of the buildings that burned. Fifteen of the apartments in Building C and 13 in Building B were occupied, she said. The city later reported that 14 in Building B were occupied.
Mitch Randles, Joplin’s interim fire chief, said the fire was called in at 10:48 a.m., and firefighters arrived on the scene three minutes later. The nearest fire station is just a couple of blocks away on Texas Avenue.
The fire had spread from Building C to Building B by the time firefighters arrived. Randles said that with the help of police, firefighters quickly searched every apartment in both buildings to make sure everyone was out.
Heat intensity
There may have been a slight breeze from the south that contributed to the spread of the fire, although Randles said he believes the intensity of the heat from the flames was a more likely cause.
“I don’t know that the wind did it so much as the radiant heat,” he said.
Young parents Steven and Jamie Peterson and their 2-year-old child were asleep in a second-floor apartment on the southeast side of Building B.
“We woke up right at 10:50 a.m., and (Building B) was already on fire,” Steven Peterson said.
He said they could feel the heat from the fire in the building to the south radiating through their bedroom window. Popping and cracking sounds were coming from next door as well, they said. In fact, that’s what woke them both up, they said.
“It sounded like rain hitting the window,” Jamie Peterson said.
The firefighters were just arriving as they grabbed their child and left the building.
Randles said authorities decided early on to evacuate Building A to the north of Building B in case the fire made another jump between buildings. Other nearby apartment buildings also were evacuated as a precautionary measure.
The fire, which sent dark smoke billowing into the sky over the south side of town that could be seen from a mile or more away, drew numerous onlookers, and some minor traffic jams developed in the area. Joplin police and Newton County sheriff’s deputies worked to keep streets open as best they could for the passage of emergency vehicles.
The cause of the fire had not been determined by Monday night.
“I don’t think we ever will know,” Randles said.
The city fire marshal and other investigators are fairly certain the origin of the fire was in the attic space above the third floor of Building C. But the roof and attic were destroyed, and it is unlikely that investigators will be able to determine the cause with any certainty, Randles said.
1999 fire
A fire in December 1999 destroyed Building F at the Oxford Park II Apartments. Occupants were able to escape that fire with only minor injuries even though it started about 4 a.m. when many were still asleep.
