MT. AIRY — A vehicle fire in the parking lot of Habersham Central High School near Mt. Airy destroyed that car and damaged one parked nearby Thursday morning.
“We got the call of a vehicle fire in the parking lot of the high school,” said Habersham County Fire Chief Jeff Cain. “We got on the scene and had a small passenger car about 50 percent involved, with heavy fire in the engine compartment and heavy fire in the front passenger compartment.”
That fire, reported before 9 a.m., threatened other vehicles parked nearby.
“We had damage to one adjacent small car,” Cain said. “The one vehicle was a total loss. The other one had some major cosmetic damage.”
Cain said officials aren’t sure what caused the fire just outside the high school.
“We really don’t know the cause right now,” Cain said. “The guy that was driving and the girl that was behind him said it was smoking as he was coming up the road, she said extremely more so than what seemed to be normal. She always parks beside him, and when she pulled up it was smoking real bad so she moved her vehicle then.”
Because of the reported location adjacent to the school, numerous fire stations responded.
“When they first gave it out, they gave it out as a vehicle fire within 100 feet of the building, so we treated it as a commercial alarm just due to the fact that it is a large educational building,” Cain said. “We actually had three stations respond, which would have been 9, 14 and 13.”
The fire in the parking lot did not result in the evacuation of the school.
“There was minimal disruption,” Cain said. “You know when you have a vehicle on fire in your parking lot everybody is wanting to look at it, but as far as traffic it was minimal disruption. They didn’t evacuate because it never really became an issue with the school itself. It was a little farther away than they initially said it was. Our biggest concern was just due to the sheer number of vehicles parked around it, exposure problems on the other vehicles, but we were able to hold it just to that one exposure.”
