Rustburg man charged with arson in Wards Road fire

Charles Chittum

The fire that ripped through a car repair shop on Wards Road early Tuesday and destroyed phone, cable and power lines was started intentionally, said Campbell County authorities.

Investigator Tracy Emerson, with the Campbell County Sheriff’s Office, said Charles Chittum, of Rustburg, was arrested Tuesday and charged with arson in the blaze that disrupted communication in parts of Campbell County for most of the day.

“It’s devastating you know. It’s hard to believe that I don’t have anywhere to work now,” said Ishmael Lunetta, who ran a garage there for 16 years.

“I couldn’t believe my eyes because this is all I’ve got to make money with except my rollback,” he said, adding, “I’m going to go look for a job. Maybe two jobs, who knows?”

Calling the sheriff’s office, government offices or even non-emergency lines of the county’s Emergency Communications Center was nearly impossible until mid-afternoon.

Campbell County’s Web site went down. Residents were out of power; cable service was disrupted.

The problems began when a blaze broke out at Discount Auto Service across Wards Road from Lynchburg Regional Airport shortly after 2 a.m.

No one was injured in the fire, said Warren Peters, assistant fire marshal for the county. Traffic was blocked on U.S. 29 as emergency workers from Brookville-Timberlake, Lyn-Dan Heights and Evington volunteer fire departments, Campbell County Public Safety and Campbell County Rescue responded.

The fire burned a utility pole in two and severed the lines for six utility providers — a power company, two telecommunications companies and three cable providers.

Outages were spotty, with various cell phone company customers reporting different problems and some Lynchburg residents reporting problems calling county phone numbers with 332 and 592 prefixes.

Calls to 911 were largely unaffected, said Tracy Fairchild, manager of the county’s emergency communications.

The service disruptions affected calls into the center that came on non-emergency lines, she said. The difficulty for dispatchers came with calls to 911 from cellular phones, where dispatchers often could not hear the callers, Fairchild said. Dispatchers were able to track the location and the number for those calls and return them to determine the nature of the emergency.

The county’s Web site was down through mid-afternoon, as were Internet connections at the county’s Rustburg government complex. Some outside phone calls could get through to government offices, but many callers heard busy signals until about 2 p.m. Some county employees also had difficulty calling out.

Phone problems were “sporadic” and depended on where callers lived, said County Administrator David Laurrell. For example, he said, he received a call from someone in Altavista around 10 a.m. and was able to call out from his office phone.

Rick Stein, deputy director of the Lynchburg Regional Airport, said while communications systems were disrupted and smoke rolled across the airport’s parking lot, flights were not delayed.

“Our telephone and data lines went down, but we do have back-ups in place for communications,” Stein said.

Harry Mitchell, spokesman for Verizon, said the fire burned the company’s fiber optic and copper line, disrupting service in the county as well as service for some Embarq customers in Prince Edward and Buckingham counties.

Services were restored for all six utility providers by late afternoon Tuesday.

Emerson, the Campbell County Sheriff’s Office investigator, did not know Chittum’s exact age, but placed him in his early 20s.

He did not release how, where or why the fire was started. “At this time we just know that it was deliberately started,” he said.

Emerson said Chittum was not associated with the business. Court records show Chittum has a hearing scheduled for Thursday on burglary charges.