The Day of : Where there's Smoke...

Day of the Fire-

For me the day started like any other weekday morning, riding to work on the UGA campus with my wife. We lived on the opposite side of town up above Athens, and as we came over the crest of the hill, we saw a giant plume of smoke and immediately turned on the local radio station, praying that our immediate fears weren't playing out. Apparently, a young man walking by the front doors of the GATH saw smoke coming from beneath them and called it in.

By then the radio jock was warning everyone to stay away from downtown because the GEORGIA THEATRE WAS ON FIRE! I told my wife, “f**k that, haul ass downtown!”

I needed to see just how bad it really was. I was so shocked that I didn't have sense enough to pull out my phone and take a picture of the plume of smoke as we were coming down the hill on Barnett Shoals. My mind was racing because I had just spent a year and a half of intensive work, repair, and acquisition of new audio and lighting equipment. If this was a bad fire, a whole lot of blood sweat, and tears, and money were going up in smoke. I can't even begin to tell you how many hours I spent in the GATH repairing in 2007-09, rebuilding and installing stuff in my spare time and on my own dime. Let alone how much money had already been spent in the last year on internal and external upgrades by the owners. Holy crap it was nearly six figures in recent remodeling and equipment purchases from what I was told. It can't be stated more plainly, but this was a true labor of love by all of those involved because there definitely wasn't huge compensation involved in running the club! Everyone putting in all that hard work and investment hoped that GATH was on its way to becoming something larger and better than it ever had been. I just wanted to be able to look visiting bands and engineers in the eye with the pride of a professional. This is a problem in many venues around the world and is much more prevalent than most people would believe. Having top-notch staff that is engaged and professional is hard to do at club wages. More than anything, I was determined to break that stereotype while I worked at the GATH.

During the Fire-

I don't have many good pictures of the early part of the day. There is plenty of footage and documentation of the fire and ensuing efforts to douse it. I arrived at 8:10 AM and the scene was a madhouse already. Despite the warnings of all the media outlets, everyone rushed downtown to see what was going on. Within an hour they announced that all the power was being shut down to entire blocks of downtown Athens out of safety concerns. Unknown to everyone at the time, the roof was about to collapse on the internal fire, which really complicated the situation for the firefighters. They were pouring so much water on the building that the high voltage underground electrical bunkers that connected to all of downtown were beginning to show signs of possible flooding and that would really make a bad day get considerably worse. Essentially, they couldn't douse the fire. The roof was so stout that its collapse trapped all the burning refuse between it and the concrete below and there was no way to get at it to put it out. The fire company finally made the call to reduce the water flow, station a ladder truck in front overnight to occasionally douse flare-ups, and just let the damn thing burn itself out.

During the day while all this was going on, management and staffers from the Theatre and many friends congregated in the parking lot opposite of the main body of onlookers. Slinking around feeling guilt and loss and a host of other emotions that nobody wanted to deal with. We were barred from getting too close so we were just sitting on the sidelines, watching something precious to us destroy itself.

Eventually, I faded away. I don't really remember what I did for many hours. I didn't even bother to call my supervisor at UGA. He was a smart guy and he knew my involvement and dedication to the theatre so I wasn't worried. I ended up back in front of it all later in the evening before sunset. There was still so much smoke obscuring downtown that you couldn't see down to the end of Clayton Street. It was far more surreal than any film or book I have ever experienced.

The next morning I dashed downtown early so I could try and get as close as possible and take some pictures but the official presence was already heavy. I managed to get this one picture below through the door before they chased me away. You can see the PA array laying on the rubble in the lower left. All the aluminum truss and lighting equipment were just gone, vaporized I reckon.

By then the fire marshal and the ATF were picking through materials and had a small crane in place to remove bits and pieces of the debris for testing and examination. I remember standing and watching the removal of an electric chain motor, used for raising and lowering the aluminum lighting truss. Usually, there are specialized machine parts attached to the truss via steel and aluminum parts and I couldn't believe how damaged this solid steel device was, let alone the fact that all the aluminum machine parts that should be attached to it were gone. It looked like a piece of debris pulled up from the Titanic, ancient and encrusted and just brutally corroded. That was the moment when I realized that everything was truly and irrevocably lost forever. The Georgia Theatre as we knew it was dead.