Mainly clear. Low around 65F. Winds light and variable..
Mainly clear. Low around 65F. Winds light and variable.
Rocky Mount Fire Department Battalion Chief Jamey Cooke gives a presentation about the fire in December at the QVC Distribution Center off Kingsboro Road.
Flames engulf the QVC Distribution Center on Dec. 18, 2021, off Kingsboro Road in Edgecombe County.
Rocky Mount Fire Department Battalion Chief Jamey Cooke gives a presentation about the fire in December at the QVC Distribution Center off Kingsboro Road.
Rocky Mount Fire Department Battalion Chief Jamey Cooke gives a presentation about the fire in December at the QVC Distribution Center off Kingsboro Road.
Rocky Mount Fire Department Battalion Chief Jamey Cooke gives a presentation about the fire in December at the QVC Distribution Center off Kingsboro Road.
Rocky Mount Fire Department Battalion Chief Jamey Cooke gives a presentation about the fire in December at the QVC Distribution Center off Kingsboro Road.
Rocky Mount Fire Department Battalion Chief Jamey Cooke gives a presentation about the fire in December at the QVC Distribution Center off Kingsboro Road.
Flames engulf the QVC Distribution Center on Dec. 18, 2021, off Kingsboro Road in Edgecombe County.
Rocky Mount Fire Department Battalion Chief Jamey Cooke gives a presentation about the fire in December at the QVC Distribution Center off Kingsboro Road.
Rocky Mount Fire Department Battalion Chief Jamey Cooke gives a presentation about the fire in December at the QVC Distribution Center off Kingsboro Road.
Rocky Mount Fire Department Battalion Chief Jamey Cooke gives a presentation about the fire in December at the QVC Distribution Center off Kingsboro Road.
Rocky Mount Fire Department Battalion Chief Jamey Cooke gives a presentation about the fire in December at the QVC Distribution Center off Kingsboro Road.
A Rocky Mount Fire Department battalion chief who served as incident commander at the scene of the blaze at the QVC distribution facility off U.S. 64 in Edgecombe County recently gave a presentation about what happened and about the city’s part in what turned out to be a massive response.
“The fire had a very large head start on all of us, even the first arriving units,” Jamey Cooke told the City Council and Mayor Sandy Roberson on Feb. 14 during a council work session. The cause of the fire remains under investigation, so Cooke could not be too specific in his presentation.
The fire was reported in Edgecombe County at 2:06 a.m. on Dec. 18, which was a Saturday. The Heartsease and Lewis community volunteer fire departments each responded with two trucks and the West Edgecombe volunteer fire department responded with a truck.
The Rocky Mount Fire Department at 2:19 a.m. was requested to assist and the response began at 2:37 a.m. The department sent Cooke, along with a safety officer, a ladder truck and a rescue company.
“We arrived on scene to find a large commercial structure about 75 percent involved and what appeared to be a total roof collapse of all the areas involved in fire,” Cooke said.
According to Cooke, the QVC facility was 1.5 million square feet in size on about a 300-acre total site and employed more than 2,000 people in a 24/7 operation.
The count was 284 people working at the facility when the fire alarm went off, but most of the employees were on break time or eating and were able to leave fairly quickly, Cooke said.
The facility was equipped with a standard sprinkler system designed for high-rack storage, with the system powered by two diesel pumps and with the system including a 250-gallon on-site water tank, Cooke said.
Additionally, the facility was supplied with a 12-inch water line, included 20 hydrants owned by QVC and there was also a million-gallon elevated water tank less than a mile away, Cooke said.
However, shortly after arrival on the scene, water supplies were found to be an issue, Cooke said.
Eventually, all water supplies at the QVC facility were lost, disabling the fire pumps and the sprinkler systems, Cooke said. A decision was made to go to shuttling water in from off-site locations via tankers.
Until the daylight hours, all fire suppression efforts were performed outside by using aerial devices, Cooke said. The goal was to protect the building’s firewalls.
Generally, firewalls are fire-resistant structures usually made of concrete, concrete blocks or reinforced concrete to compartmentalize a structure and, in the process, restrict the spread of a fire.
Just before daylight, drone footage showed what appeared to be a fire on an opposite side of the firewall on the southeast side of the QVC facility, Cooke said.
Crews went inside with hand lines to extinguish a moderate-size fire and other crews were able to gain access to the top to extinguish a rubber membrane roof burning on the south side, Cooke said.
Overall, five million gallons of water were used within the first 24 hours of the incident, Cooke said.
According to Cooke, after multiple confirmations that all QVC staff was accounted for, the Edgecombe County Sheriff’s Office started receiving reports about 10:30 a.m. saying a person was unaccounted for.
After several hours, the reports were confirmed and crews began a search and recovery mission, Cooke said.
“During this incident, especially the first 15 hours, we had multiple reports of people missing because of the way QVC operated — your car keys, your telephone, none of that stuff could be on your person,” he said.
“It had to be locked up in your locker,” he said. “So when everyone left, a lot of people rode home with their friends, co-workers — and they stayed at their house hoping to be able to get back in and get their personal belongings.”
He said that when family members found out about the fire and they became unable to make contact with family members employed at the facility, the Edgecombe County Sheriff’s Office’s communications system began to be flooded with reports, Cooke said.
Due to the dangers and hazards at the QVC facility, the search for the missing person was halted by nighttime and resumed at 7 a.m. Dec. 19, Cooke said.
The missing person was located about 11:45 a.m. in what had been a work area he had been assigned to and about 181 feet from a doorway, Cooke said.
Kevon Ricks, 21, was the one who perished in the fire.
“We did not want to lose a life, but we could have lost many more,” Cooke said.
At the same time, Cooke was quite candid about the difficulties encountered in addition to the fire having such a large head start.
One of those difficulties, he said, was that the main natural gas line was damaged during the collapse of the roof at the northeast corner of the facility, meaning firefighters could not immediately get to that area or had to go a long way around to get there.
Another difficulty, he said, was limited knowledge of the building and a lack of current pre-planning of the facility.
He also told of difficulty keeping some of the key QVC command staff at the command post.
“They had a lot going on,” he said.
He said that specifically, the QVC command staff were trying to contact their supervisors and get plans of action about what they needed to do.
“So, it was kind of tough to keep ’em around sometimes,” he said.
He also cited a lack of experience on command staffs of the volunteer agencies.
“This is just one of those things that it takes many, many years of experience to handle an incident of this size,” he said. “It was a learning experience for all of us.”
During the presentation, Cooke also spoke of effects beyond the facility, with embers causing almost three acres of a wooded area to catch on fire.
Cooke said ash and debris were found as far away as Hobgood.
He showed an image of weather radar to illustrate the extent of the heat and smoke and to illustrate that the fire resulted in high winds and rain.
During his presentation, Cooke said Rocky Mount was the source of the eventually depleted water supply to QVC.
City Communications, Marketing and Public Relations Director Kirk Brown subsequently clarified to the Telegram that Edgecombe County, not the city, was the water supplier to the QVC facility.
QVC is the network based northwest of Philadelphia that focuses on offering viewers a televised, in-home shopping experience. QVC is part of the Qurate Retail Group, which is a Denver-area-based media conglomerate.
Shortly after the Dec. 18 fire that destroyed much of the QVC Distribution Center located off Kingsboro Road, a concerted effort got underway …
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