Arkansas City fire officials say the cause of a fire that gutted a large home at 213 E. Central will be classified as undetermined even though investigators believe the blaze may have been intentionally set.
"There are a number of indicators that give us reason to believe it wasn’t an accident," fire marshal Gary Bowker said Tuesday. "If we’re presented with new information or new evidence in the future, we’ll reopen the investigation."
Among those indicators are areas in the home where a specially-trained dog detected the presence of accelerants commonly used to start fires. But, lab testing done to detect the presence of such accelerants was inconclusive in this case, Bowker said.
The home’s owner, Anthony Shea, was sleeping inside the structure when the fire occurred late on the night of Aug. 27 but was able to escape uninjured.
Bowker is not hopeful new information will materialize, especially since the two-story residence was demolished shortly after the fire. If the scene had remained undisturbed a while longer, he said, some additional testing might have been done.
The building was torn down before insurance investigators could visit the site.
"It hampered our efforts, somewhat," Bowker said of the razing.
A decision to bring down the building was made by Matt Rowland, the city’s director of code enforcement. He’s standing by the call he made to tear the structure down less than 48 hours after the fire.
The main concern, Rowland said, was that structure appeared to be in a state of "imminent failure" and could have fallen on a house next door that had people living in it.
"Does that mean I could guarantee it was going to come falling down?" Rowland said. "No, but I couldn’t guarantee it wasn’t, either."
The city would have needed to see a plan from a forensic engineer to shore the building up before allowing the structure to remain standing, he said. The city attempted to contact the insurance company by phone the Friday morning following the fire but never heard from anyone with the company until they arrived in Ark City.
By that time the building had been razed.
The fire department, Rowland said, had released the scene to Shea, who was ready to return to Texas, his home state. That basically left the property in the city’s hands, according to Rowland.
"At that point the fire department had released the scene and I believed any criminal investigation had concluded," he said. "I’d much rather it had stayed up so that it could be examined, but there was no plan in place for that to happen."
The fire department, Bowker said, recommended the remains of the structure be left alone until insurance adjustors arrived but the building came down anyway.
The city will bill Shea for the price of bringing the house down. That bill will be in excess of $10,000.
