Many Wheeling residents watched “Hoarders” on A&E this past Monday evening and saw local residents experiencing issues with hoarding, but the problem is more prevalent than most realize, according to Fire Chief Larry Helms.
The cable show exploited a family issue that involved a mother and her grown children, and the son and mother live in the Center Wheeling neighborhood. The producers of the show financed a clearing and cleansing that included crews from Panhandle Cleaning and Restoration of Wheeling, but Helms explained the highlighted residence is not the only one in the city that he suspects is full of belongings and refuse.
“It’s absolutely an issue in the city, and we run into those from time to time, but it is not like we have a serious issue with anything similar,” Helms reported. “But those situations are very similar to the issues with the maintenance of the exteriors of properties because it affects everyone around them, and it doesn’t matter who you are because it’s all about mental illness.
“We have run into some cases, maybe four of five in the last 15 years, where we have had fires at locations where we couldn’t even make entry because of the obstructions in the way, and I remember one call where our crews couldn’t even make it to the second floor because there was so much debris,” he said. “They describe it as trying to swim upstream against a pretty good current.”
Fuel for Fire
There was a time when house fires produced white smoke, but now the blazes burn black because of the amount of plastic inside homes these days.
“Just look around you. Almost everything is plastic,” Helms said. “That’s why we are very, very careful these days about exposure because that black smoke means there are toxins burning, and it has been proven that those toxins cause firefighters to come down with cancer.
“The way we enter any structure fire has changed a lot since I first joined the department, and that’s the main reason why,” he said. “From the incidents that we have had in the city, everything seems to always be in those plastic bags we get at the grocery stores, so that makes it a lot more dangerous for our crews.”
There Are More
Hoarding is not new in Wheeling or anywhere in the country, and that is why A&E has been able to produce the show for 11 seasons, and Helms confirmed fire officials are aware of other properties in similar condition at this time.
Over the past five years, the Wheeling Fire Department has responded to more emergency calls during any other span in its history, but that overload has allowed firefighters to see more than ever before.
“We are aware of other locations that are in the city of Wheeling right now, and that’s because of calls we’ve received for emergency services,” Helms said. “We’ve been called to those homes because of mental health concerns or medical emergencies, and our firefighters then do what they can about prevention because of the risks.
“When we discover those kinds of houses, we do what we can to address them through the local organizations,” he explained. “We have jurisdiction when it comes to those issues in apartment buildings, but not with single-family dwellings or even duplexes, but we definitely do what we can to help the people in those situations.”
Let It Burn?
When the Wheeling Department responded on New Year’s Eve to the blaze that erupted at the former Exposition Hall on Wheeling Island, Helms was aware the building was utilized as storage area for filing cabinets filled with paper documents from at least 20 years of business.
That meant there was no way a single one of his firefighters was entering the structure, and the same approach could be adopted if a fire took place at a known hoarder’s house.
“Life safety is our primary goal, and when we encounter a property like that, our concentration is figuring out if there are lives in danger inside the residence for the reasons we were called to the location in the first place,” Helms said. “Now, if we find out that there’s no one inside the structure, then we shift our concern to the safety of the firefighters and concentrate on just getting the fire out to minimize any possible damage to surrounding properties.
“We have to make calculations on every call that we respond to, and sometimes we choose to attack the fire from the outside to protect our firefighters, and when we run into places that are just packed full of things we don’t know about, that’s the approach we have to take,” he continued. “Each call is different, and we find ourselves in ‘adapt-and-overcome’ situations all of the time, and these hoarder houses definitely present a lot of challenges for our firefighters.”
