A discarded cigarette or the burn barrel that a Lynchburg man kept on the front porch of his Cabell Street home sparked the blaze that killed James Edward Bayes last week.
One or both ignited a sofa sitting on the front porch of Bayes’ home, Lynchburg Fire Marshal Greg Wormser said Tuesday. The sofa caught the front of the house on fire, quickly burning through the old wood and trapping Bayes inside.
The house at 111 Cabell St., like others built around 1900, did not have a back entrance and for some reason Bayes, 66, could not escape from a window.
“We have determined that it started on the front porch, in between the window and the front door,” Wormser said. “The likely cause is smoking materials left unattended and/or the use of a burn barrel on the front porch that may not have been extinguished.”
The blaze destroyed the 1893 two-story, wood-sided house that Bayes had rented. His body was found in the back right corner of the house, in the kitchen area, Wormser said.
The fire, fueled by the piles of firewood on the porch used to heat the house, and the flammable liquids Bayes kept on hand for heaters and his hobby of repairing engines, spread from the porch and engulfed the front of the home just after 8 p.m. on March 9.
By the time the fire was extinguished, portions of the roof had collapsed and the second floor had fallen on the first.
Firefighters arrived within six minutes, but it wasn’t fast enough to save Bayes, Wormser said.
The last fatal fire in the city was in October 2009, when a woman who lived on Campbell Avenue died in a blaze caused by an open flame around an oxygen tank.
In the past five years, the city has had seven fatal fires, killing nine people.
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