Editor's Note: The Baltimore firefighter who died Thursday while battling a fire in row houses has been identified as Apprentice Rodney Pitts. He graduated from the fire academy in August.
Dillon Mullan
Baltimore Sun(TNS)
A firefighter died and four others were injured in a fast-spreading two-alarm rowhouse blaze Thursday in Northwest Baltimore.
Firefighters arrived around 3:45 p.m. at the 5200 block of Linden Heights Avenue in the Woodmere neighborhood, where intense flames and smoke spread to at least three houses.
Some firefighters went inside the initial building to spray water on the flames, and the fire “started to grow very rapidly,” Baltimore Fire Chief James Wallace said at a news conference outside the University of Maryland Shock Trauma.
The four injured firefighters are being treated at hospitals for burn wounds. Three are in serious condition, and one is expected to be released within 24 hours. Nobody lived in the house they entered, but the occupancy of the two other houses was not immediately clear. Two-alarm fires call for about 60 responding fire members.
The dead firefighter was not immediately identified pending family notification. About 50 of their friends and family gathered outside Shock Trauma, and a family member declined to comment.
“A hero lost their life tonight putting Baltimore first,” Mayor Brandon Scott said at a news conference. He called on the city to “wrap their arms around” members of the fire department through another tragic loss.
The death comes less than two years after three firefighters were killed and a fourth seriously injured in a vacant rowhouse fire on South Stricker Street in New Southwest/Mount Clare, a neighborhood in Central Southwest. That fire was one of the deadliest for fire responders in the city’s history.
Members of the Baltimore Fire Department lined up and saluted Thursday as an ambulance carrying the body of their colleague crawled down Lombard Street. Other members flanked the ambulance and walked in a long, quiet procession.
The cause of the fire is under investigation. No civilians were injured.
The department has emphasized training members in rescue operations since the South Stricker Street fire, and recently budgeted to add four more safety officers to its ranks. The exact fire conditions at the two-story brick rowhouses Thursday were not immediately clear.
“What I can tell you is we attacked this fire like we attack many fires,” Wallace said. “We had a rapid intervention team in place. We had crews in the front. We had crews in the rear. I’m told some of the initial indicators were that this fire just started to grow very rapidly. They don’t know why.”
The deaths of Kelsey Sadler, Kenny Lacayo and Paul Butrim in 2022 devastated the city and spurred changes to Baltimore’s fire operations, including when firefighters should enter abandoned buildings that are at risk of collapsing.
It also refocused attention on Baltimore’s chronic problem with vacant or abandoned properties that pockmark the city, and in some cases sprawl entire blocks. Since the 2022 fatal fire, Baltimore brought its vacant housing stock to the lowest level it has seen in years.
Thursday’s tragedy comes two weeks after the City Council approved Wallace to lead the grieving agency. Former Chief Niles Ford resigned in December after a line-of-duty death report by officials from Baltimore and other jurisdictions publicized organizational and procedural missteps taken by the department before and during the South Stricker Street fire. That month, family members of the fallen firefighters filed a notice with the city of their intent to sue, saying the deaths were preventable.
A Baltimore Sun investigation found the city’s vacant properties burn at twice the national rate, but gaps in record-keeping limited what firefighters knew before going inside.
James Bethea, a fire lieutenant, died in 2014 when he fell through the floor of an abandoned rowhouse. A fire recruit, Racheal Wilson, died in 2007 during a training exercise when she tried to extinguish a blaze set by instructors in a vacant rowhouse.
“Firefighters are our living superheroes. We don’t expect to lose them,” City Council President Nick Mosby said. “When they leave their home and say goodbye to their families they know that they might be met with something that might not bring them back.”
Across the state, more people died in fires from January to March than in the same period each year for the past two decades.
Councilman Isaac “Yitzy” Schleifer asked for a moment of silence during the City Council’s Thursday evening meeting “for the individual who lost their life, for the other injured firefighters as well as anybody else who is affected by the fire.”
The U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives also responded to the scene to assist the Baltimore City Fire Department.
©2023 Baltimore Sun. Visit baltimoresun.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
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