Historical Fires RSS

84 Lumber Company Fire  FRIDAY MORNING, APRIL 19, 1968, AACoFD "B" Shift, was a beautiful warm and sunny Spring day. Actually it had been a wonderful week with daily temperatures in the high 70s and my senior year at Andover H.S., in Linthicum, was winding down. Anne Arundel County schools had been closed for the week and I was doing work for the Buttrum-German-Morrison (BGM) construction company for a couple of days to earn some money. When I wasn’t working, I was running fires out of Company 32 (Linthicum). The fire department had been experiencing a busy week. There were...

THE PERFECT FIRE - TRAGEDY ON RIVERVIEW ROAD, 12-26-76, BROOKLYN PARK - THREE  ALARMS  by Joseph B. Ross Jr. Authors note: On April 23, 2018, at Fallen Heroes Day, conducted at Dulaney Valley Memorial Gardens, Firefighter Patrick Bauer and Volunteer Firefighter George Driggers received recognition for their service and sacrifice as a result of the Riverview Road fire that occurred on December 26, 1976. During the ceremony, Pat and George’s families were presented with a replica of the Fallen Heroes Memorial and a resolution from the Maryland General Assembly. Also, the two families were presented with a Governor's Proclamation, as...

THIRTY-FIVE-YEARS-AGO ON SATURDAY, APRIL 21, 1979, Anne Arundel County fire companies responded to a Six-Alarm building fire at the Serio building in the 100 block of North Crain Highway, Glen Burnie, MD. The Serio building fire was just one of three major fires that occurred on the block over a 13 month period between April 1978 and May of 1979. On Monday morning, April 3, 1978, a fire was reported at the GIen lounge, a business adjacent to and south of the Serio building at 3:36 a.m. County police officers saw smoke in the back of the bar-lounge and radioed...

THREE DAYS IN FEBRUARY 1968 - MULTIPLE ALARM FIRES Author's note: This story is very personal to me. I learned so much in a short time span that  many would find hard to believe, but I did. As a young volunteer firefighter at seventeen-years-old, a member of Company 32 (Linthicum) for a little less than a year, I was astonished. I was thinking at the time; all of these fires; all these multi-alarms. Did this happen every year or are we just going through a craze? It had been somewhat slow since I joined the company in late March of...

ON MONDAY, JANUARY 11, 1965, a Nine-alarm fire struck the old abandoned Walton Tannery complex near Curtis Bay, located on Open Street just over the Baltimore City boundary line in Anne Arundel County, MD. The fire in the two-story, heavy-timber constructed wood building was reported at 12:30 a.m.     (Map - Maryland Room, Enoch Pratt Free Library) The Walton Tannery was constructed in 1920 by Charles S. Walton and Company of Philadelphia, PA. At a cost of $500,000, the 10 and-a-half-acre complex consisting of five buildings was the largest tannery operation in the United States. The main building, or “vat...