A fire at the campus of closed-down Virginia Intermont College in Bristol, Virginia, damaged buildings dating back to its founding in the 19th century.
The Bristol Fire Department responded to the Friday blaze, though firefighters didn’t enter the buildings due to safety concerns. One firefighter was hospitalized with chest pains.
Fire officials haven’t disclosed whether any dead people were found on the property after the fire was put out.
“We are not going to send anybody in these buildings. They are supposed to be vacant,” Fire Chief Mike Armstrong told Johnson City, Tennessee, CBS/ABC affiliate WJHL-TV. “If somebody is in this building right now, they’re probably a fatality. The fire was well involved on our arrival, so it was very far gone before we even got here. And it quickly spread due to the old construction and the furnishings in the building, the paper and the books and stuff like that.”
This was the campus’ second fire in two months after the library succumbed to a blaze in November. The property has been owned by Chinese-owned U.S. Magis International since 2016. The college shut its doors to students in 2014.
Bristol City Councilman Neal Osborne, who posted a video of himself at the scene of the fire on social media at around 1:30 a.m., said: “We have tried for years to push the property owners to do something about this property, and it fell on deaf ears every single time. They will have to answer for this in my mind. They will have to answer for why this property was not secured, why they did not take proactive steps to prevent this from happening.”
The school, founded by Baptists in 1884 as Southwest Virginia Female Institute to educate women in the area, went coed in 1972, according to the Virginia Department of Historic Resources. The school was added to the Virginia Landmarks Register and the National Register of Historic Places in 1984.
• Brad Matthews can be reached at bmatthews@washingtontimes.com.
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