An underground fire was discovered on the morning of Saturday, Nov. 23 behind Williamsburg Premium Outlets in James City County.
The plastic stormwater detention system beneath the Outlets’ back parking lot burned for more than 100 hours before being extinguished the following Wednesday night by the James City County Fire Department, with help from Newport News crews.
Virginia Department of Environmental Quality, the Environmental Protection Agency and other agencies were on site monitoring the situation. No evacuations were ordered, and Williamsburg Premium Outlets opened for business as of Sunday, Nov. 24.
WHRO spoke with James City County Fire Chief Ryan Ashe about the blaze, and what’s been learned.
This interview was edited for time and clarity.
Nick McNamara: Has anything new been learned about the cause of the fire?
Ryan Ashe: No, our fire marshal's office is continuing to investigate.That will likely occur over the next couple more weeks.
They're continuing reaching out to any of the neighbors in the area, which they did a lot of that last week, continue to talk some of the business owners, just to see if they heard anything, saw anything, trying to put together a timeline. Because of the amount of damage we suspect some burn time prior to our arrival, because part of the parking lot had already collapsed.
It's going to be very difficult, if ever, to determine a cause, but they certainly want to do their due diligence to see if we can figure out something. And part of their investigation also involves research: Has there any been any other of these types anywhere else in the country, what were found as other causes, that type of thing.
So this one is certainly unique for us, and a little different than a normal fire we may encounter where we can look at things like burn patterns and to help push us back to an origin and ultimately start to determine the possible causes in that area. In this case, being underground, it was very difficult for us to see what may be the first items ignited. We're assuming it's the plastic, because that's really all that there was to burn in the ground.
It's just very challenging, and that's why we said from the beginning it's likely we may never know the exact cause.
N.M: I know concern about runoff from the storm water system slowed down the extinguishing process a bit. What changed on Wednesday that made crews more comfortable with doing it?
R.A: Well, a couple things. One, our extinguisher is water, and our application of that was really on top of the concrete in most areas. Now, that concrete was pervious, so it allowed some of that to flow through the actual concrete, but we really couldn't get the water applied to what was burning because of being deep in the ground, structurally and sort of an unknown thermal load underneath made it very difficult for equipment.
We weren't going to put excavators on there with an unknown stability for collapse, and really unknown how much or what was burning underneath. So trying to factor in all of that, the times that we had allowed it to sort of free burn, if you will, and burn on its own tended to be more complete combustion. So that actually caused the smoke layer to lift some so it's sort of a balance between that and the concern about runoff. The Virginia Department of Environmental Quality was there early on, they came on Saturday, we had an opportunity to meet with them again on Sunday, and on Monday. They did some initial water testing for what may be seen in that runoff. And we found normal things, what you would expect off of a parking lot. So by the decision there on Tuesday was that we felt like it was safe to go ahead and apply more extinguishing agent. And that's also the same day that the contractor that we had been coordinating with was willing, based on nearly 100% collapse of the parking lot, I would say greater than 90% by that point, they were willing to put an excavator on to that parking lot and start removing that concrete. And at that point, we knew that our extinguishment efforts could actually get to what was burning.
N.M: And you mentioned, this fire was a pretty unique situation. Were there any lessons learned that will be carried forward at the department?
R.A: Yeah, I think so for sure. One of those is identifying where all these types of facilities are in our county, just for a better situational awareness, being underground just makes access for us very difficult, and we don't have that equipment readily. So coordinating with the contractor was certainly necessary for them. They had the equipment but not the extinguishing; we had the extinguishment but not the equipment.
And I think we have an opportunity to do tabletop exercises and we do classes with outside agencies and state agencies. And I think this was one of those examples where relationships are made before the incident. For the representatives from the Virginia Department of Emergency Management, our local hazmat teams, the DEQ representatives, were all people we had a relationship with before even the property owners. Our fire marshal's office regularly working with them on routine business inspections that we do annually. So we already had the relationships. And I think while that necessarily isn’t a lesson learned, it certainly reinforced the importance of having those relationships built prior to an event, and I think that made the communication and the trust and the coordination much easier when we actually had the real event.
