Some residents of Four Seasons Villa Resort had to be evacuated by private boat after a fire ripped through a row of town houses in the gated community, as other property owners tried in vain to use garden hoses to stem the inferno.
Four houses were destroyed, and three more have varying degrees of fire and smoke damage. No one was reported injured, officials said. Although the exact cause of the fire late Saturday night has yet to be determined, residents said they think it began under a car parked in the carport of one of the homes.
"I went through my screen porch area, that's no longer there, dropped [the hose] over and tried to spray the house," homeowner Monte Dilick said Sunday. "It was so intense; the wood was just like kindling. It just went up like it was nothing."
Autumn Carlisle, chief of the 70 West Fire Department, said that although most of the residences in Four Seasons are vacation homes, at least two of the four that were destroyed were occupied by year-round residents. The resort includes boat docks and sun decks and is near Lake Hamilton and the Ouachita River in Garland County. The fire was on Kleinshore Road.
[VIDEOS: Tweets show massive fire along Lake Hamilton]
Carlisle said the blaze originated from a vehicle close to the first in a row of four town houses. Just before the start of the fire, Carlisle said, residents had seen people shooting off fireworks.
"They believed they heard the fireworks go off, they saw the back unit of their complex caught on fire, their vehicle caught on fire, and then they said that it rapidly started spreading to the adjacent structures," she said.
Carlisle said the fire was difficult to fight because of the proximity, age and composition of the structures. She also pointed out that none of the houses had sprinkler systems installed, which could have tempered the blaze.
"We had a big fire immediately," she said.
Dilick's house was built in the 1940s. He said the old wood that was used for the foundation apparently doomed the home from the first spark.
The four homes that were destroyed were close to each other -- so close that resident Sandra Luman said a long wooden deck connected three of them.
Luman had just finished remodeling her own home weeks before the fire. Her neighbor, Tina Haney, was planning to complete her move-in Sunday. Haney had been living in the house for several weeks while working on permanently moving herself and her family into the lake house, once used as a vacation home.
"A lot of our belongings were already inside the house. Irreplaceable items, like baby photos of my kids, are just gone. We're devastated, but the most important thing is that no one was hurt," Haney said.
Pillars of smoke still rose from large piles of debris the next morning as homeowners assessed the extent of the damage under the light of day. Charred bits of wood and warped pieces of metal were scattered about the road, as CenterPoint Energy and Entergy Arkansas worked to secure gas mains and power lines.
The extreme heat melted cars parked too close to the flames and melted siding and doors of surrounding houses. Even the needles of a tall pine towering over the property were discolored as a result.
"It was hot, so, so hot. You couldn't stand to be on the patio of my house because of the extreme amount of heat," Craig Davis said.
Dilick and Davis attempted to fight the fire with garden hoses before quickly discovering they were no match for the flames. Once they realized that, they began dousing surrounding houses with water and alerting neighbors to evacuate immediately. Some residents were able to flee in vehicles, but the majority of those living in the area were essentially trapped, the only available escape route being by boat.
People passing by on boats began to stop at the docks near the homes when they realized the structures were on fire. For nearly 30 minutes, Lane Stovall, his uncle and two men he works with helped alert those in nearby homes and evacuated them via boat.
Stovall and his uncle were returning to their cars after viewing the fireworks on the east side of Lake Hamilton when they saw smoke and an ominous glow from Kleinshore Road.
"I was dropped off on the dock and started on what I guess was the south end, just knocking on doors, trying to get people out," Stovall said. "My co-worker, Robby Shultz, was doing the same thing from the opposite direction."
Residents are now thinking about what to do next.
Dilick, who has lived in the area for about 11 years, has no plans to relocate. A disaster that could have easily destroyed morale has brought the already close-knit community even closer, he said.
Luman added: "We're OK. It can be rebuilt. It can be all right."
State Desk on 07/03/2017