Gerry McGhee Quotations

When you've got a major gas leak like that everybody working around it has to turn their radios off and everything else off because any kind of little spark would ignite it.

When we arrived on the scene, the home was totally involved.

He had told us that he had left a battery charger on a lawn mower and we checked it out and determined that the cause of the fire started around the lawn mower. It could have been the battery charger being plugged up so long or the battery itself.

He had some bullets and paint cans in the back of the garage and the heat and fire caused them to go off causing multiple explosions.

We don't know how the fire started. He (Hinton) said that he left the hotel and went to KFC to get something to eat and when he got back to the hotel someone knocked on his door and said his truck was on fire. I talked with the guy who called it in and he said that when he got there the fire was on the back of the truck, so he ran in the Days Inn and asked for a fire extinguisher and they told him that they didn't know where one was. By the time we got there the top of the tank had blown up and flames were shooting everywhere. The truck was totally engulfed.

Days Inn didn't have much damage. It was mostly contained to the truck. We did evacuate the south side of the hotel and kept water on it until we could get foam hooked up so we could put out the fire. We had to use 30 gallons of foam to put out the fire.

The administration at Escambia High did a good job evacuating, I can't say enough about them.

It took them a while to get to it, but once they did it didn't take them long to fix it. It had too much pressure coming off of it, so they had to put a valve on the end of a piece of pipe and put it on there to get the pressure off while they fixed it.

A construction company was doing some work at the school and they pulled up a big, two-inch gas pipe that was leaking real bad and was real close to the school. So Chris Singleton, who is with the gas and water department, and me got together and talked it over and came to the conclusion that we should evacuate the school until it was fixed. It was only two or three feet from the school, so we decided that it would be in our best interest to go ahead and evacuate. We didn't think anything would happen, but you never know. We just wanted to be on the safe side.