Ocean Isle Beach remembers fire that killed 7 students

Nobody really likes dwelling on a tragedy, especially when it involves the worst disaster in the 49-year history of Ocean Isle Beach.

It’s hard, though, when visitors still ask for the location of the fire on this Brunswick County barrier island that killed seven South Carolina college students and injured another six.

Some just drive by and stop at the canal-front lot, now empty except for a few palm trees and a dock with a “Private Property” sign on it.

Others stop, get out and walk around the lot at 1 Scotland St.

Some leave flowers. Others just stare.

But the pilgrimage is slowing, down to just a few cars a week now, said Harold Atkins, who owns two homes across the canal from the fire site.

Atkins, who lives in High Point, heard about the fire when one of the University North Carolina-Chapel Hill students who was staying at one of his houses called that morning.

He rushed down to the coast, finding embers and ash coating his deck and siding and a blackened hulk of a house just yards away.

“It was one of those times when you really don’t know what to do, what to say,” Atkins said. “It was a terrible accident. But that’s what I firmly believe it was. Just a terrible accident that happened.”

Now, like the town, he’s trying to move on.

Not to forget. Just to turn the page.

Atkins said that process was helped when the remnants of the charred house were demolished this spring.

He said when a new house eventually emerges on the sandy lot, that healing process will take another step forward.

Ocean Isle Beach in May also dedicated a memorial to the seven victims at the foot of the high-rise bridge that connects this beach resort to the mainland.

Mayor Debbie Smith said she hopes the memorial, a steel cross with the names of the victims and the words “Friends Together Forever” chiseled in granite at its base, has helped bring some closure for the community and the families.

She said she is proud of the way the town’s emergency services responded to the fire and how the island’s residents opened their hearts and homes to help the victims’ families in the days after the tragedy.

Smith said improving fire prevention, including educating the thousands of yearly visitors to the island’s numerous rental properties, remains an ongoing goal.

Atkins, standing on his back porch overlooking the fire site, said he’s still amazed how far and wide word of the tragedy reached.

He said he was asked about it while visiting his daughter in California and on the subway in New York on the way to a Yankees game

“It was a major tragedy with national significance,” Atkins said.

He said he’s heard about the push by some of the victims’ families to make sprinklers in large or multi-story residential structures mandatory.

“Sprinkler systems would be a small price to pay to save lives,” Atkins said, nodding his head in agreement with the idea.

However, he knows it could take a generation for today’s houses to be replaced with newer structures equipped with sprinklers.

“But there has to be a beginning,” Atkins said.

Town officials hope that while the physical scars of the tragedy retreat further into the past, the memory of what happened does not.

“This is a day we will remember forever as a tragedy and a void in our hearts,” said Ocean Isle Commissioner C.D. Blythe. “It’s a sad day in their lives and for all of Ocean Isle Beach, and we join in extending our prayers for continued peace and health to them as they deal with what happened on a daily basis.”

Gareth McGrath: 343-2384

gareth.mcgrath@starnewsonline.com