The Ocean Isle Beach house fire occurred on October 28, 2007. Shortly before 7:00 AM, EDT, a four alarm fire severely damaged a three-story beach house on a waterfront lot on Scotland Street in Ocean Isle Beach, a town located in Brunswick County, North Carolina, United States. The house was occupied by 13 college students on a weekend vacation and was owned by the family of one. Seven people were killed, all by smoke inhalation and carbon monoxide poisoning. It was the deadliest fire in Brunswick county in decades.
Although smoke alarms were present and had activated within the house, it had no sprinkler system or alarm monitoring system, neither of which were required by building codes or local laws.
Survivors of the fire said smoke detectors woke them "with only moments to escape."
The following September, many students joined several of the survivors and mothers of fire victims in a trip to Washington DC to advocate additional congressional efforts regarding fire safety and prevention.
Read more about Ocean Isle Beach House Fire: The House and Fire, Officials, Others Respond With Support, Investigation, Local Memorials, Fire Site Cleared, Victims, Future Considerations: Sprinklers, Monitored Alarms, Building Codes
Famous quotes containing the words ocean, isle, beach, house and/or fire:
“It would be better for men
To be few and live far apart, where none could infect another; then
slowly the sanity of field and mountain
And the cold ocean and glittering stars might enter their minds.”
—Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962)
“She carries in the dishes,
And lays them in a row.
To an isle in the water
With her would I go.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“A young person is a person with nothing to learn
One who already knows that ice does not chill and fire does not burn . . .
It knows it can spend six hours in the sun on its first
day at the beach without ending up a skinless beet,
And it knows it can walk barefoot through the barn
without running a nail in its feet. . . .
Meanwhile psychologists grow rich
Writing that the young are ones’ should not
undermine the self-confidence of which.”
—Ogden Nash (1902–1971)
“Happy will that house be in which the relations are formed from character; after the highest, and not after the lowest order; the house in which character marries, and not confusion and a miscellany of unavowable motives.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“You can much sooner dry you by such a fire as you can make in the woods than in anybody’s kitchen, the fireplace is so much larger, and wood so much more abundant.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)