Video: Local family thankful to be alive after house fire

J. Max Davis, 41, was half asleep when his children were awakened by a thunderous clap of lighting near their Brenton Court home early Wednesday morning. 

A second bolt had struck an air conditioning unit, travelling into a gas main into the garage, where it sparked a fire at 5:30 a.m. just beneath their 5-year-old son Max’s bedroom.  Their AV receiver exploded and began to smoke. Then his wife Carrie yelled repeatedly, “The house is on fire! The house is on fire!”

This was the impetus of the fire that destroyed the Davis home in the 3300 block of Breton Court. The Davis' said they may have to gut the home and totally renovate the property.

The Escape

J. Max Davis, a Georgia native, is used to hearing loud thunder during the spring season. Even as his wife yelled, he was hesitant to believe that the lighting strike had lead to a fire spreading rapidly through his home.  He thought for a moment of putting out the fire with water from the sink, but when smoke began to pour out through light fixtures and fill their baby's Liza’s bedroom, Davis knew he had to get everyone out.

The family, including the children Lydia, 7, Max, 5, and Liza, 2, took just two-and-a-half minutes from the start of the fire to get out of the house. Their chocolate labrador retriever, Charlie, had already escaped through his doggy door.

Carrie Davis, 38, was exercising in the media room downstairs, and quickly realized that the fire was a serious problem.

“You could tell instantly what kind of a fire it was, that it wasn’t just little”, said Carrie. “Everything was going to be gone.”

The 911 calls

J. Max Davis said his wife had called 911 three times. It took emergency services 18-20 minutes to arrive, he said -  a problem he blames not on the fire department, but on the way the 911 calls were routed.

“It took them a while to get here. From what we found out since then, the call was routed to Sandy Springs first, then to the city of Atlanta, then to Dekalb county,” said Davis. “It wasn’t necessarily the fire department. When they got the call, it took them about 7-8 minutes. It took them 10-12 minutes to get the call.”

Meka Parish, spokesperson for the DeKalb County Police Department said because Davis called from a cell phone, the call was routed to Chatahoochie River 9-1-1 or ChatComm before it was dispatched to DeKalb County. Parish said mobile phone calls from the tower in Davis' community are covered by ChatComm.

"We received two calls from that incident," Parish said. "We recieved a call at 5:26, which was dispatched at 5:27. We were on the scene at 5:35," she said. "There was a second call at 5:35 where a lady called and said, "Where are you? Oh, you're here now," said Parish.

Neighbors rallied together

Despite the early morning hours and rainy weather, the Davis’s neighbors on Breton Court ran out onto the street with them.  Carrie Davis was reassured by their presence.

“It’s pouring down rain, and your kids and everybody are in their pajamas with bare feet, running out of your house so terrified, but then to have your two neighbors coming running toward you, you just felt, immediately like ‘OK, we’re safe so, all of that can go’,” said Carrie Davis, pointing to her home.

The Davis’ neighborhood and church, Our Lady of the Assumption, helped them inventory everything that had been damaged.

“The insurance adjuster had never been to a place where they had had that many people help on something like this so much,” said J. Max Davis. 

When it comes to what was lost in the fire, J. Max Davis, an attorney, and Carrie Davis, a teacher, are thankful for all that remains. They escaped the fire unharmed and they took measures well before to ensure their valuables remained protected. The family’s photo albums, J. Max’s gun collection, Carrie’s jewelry, their paperwork, and their children’s early drawings and cards were all saved.

“Anything that was important to us was either in a safe or out in the [part of] the house that didn’t have the intense flame,” said J. Max Davis. “The rest is just stuff. It’s all replaceable."

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