By John Breech

Thanks to a raging fire, January 29 was black Friday in Roswell. Around 1:30 p.m., the Roswell fire department received a call regarding a two-alarm fire on Arnold Mill Road.

As the RFD made their way to the site, Roswell Fire Chief Ricky Spencer said that the fire had already produced columns and columns of black smoke. The thick black smoke produced by the raging fire covered a few miles of sky in both Roswell and Milton for several hours.

According to Spencer, the fire, which occurred at Torres Tire, appears to have been started on accident. “They were working on a car [in the shop] and something went wrong and the car caught on fire.” With so many flammable objects inside of a tire store, the fire quickly spread.

Spencer says that fighting the fire was tricky too, “The main problem we had when we got here was that there is no public water on this portion of Arnold Mill Road.” With no public water, the RFD had to pull water from the nearest hydrant, which according to Spencer, was over 2300 feet away.

With the help of the Milton and Cherokee County Fire Departments, the fire was contained to only the Torres Tire building. Spencer says that although the Torres building was a total loss, the fire squads were able to accomplish something vital to public safety: they were able to keep the fire from spreading to surrounding buildings.

The Roswell Fire Chief estimates that anywhere between 15 and 30 cars were damaged. At press time, it wasn’t clear if the cars were going to be salvageable.

As big as the fire was, no injuries were reported from Torres Tire or the responding fire units.