Rising from the Ashes: Boggy Creek fire station trying to get back on track

Graphic by Evan Lewis

Originally published in the Texarkana Gazette and on writeforarkansas.org on June 27, 2011.

On the night of Jan. 14, 2003, about two hours after firefighters had finished repairing a truck and gone home, the Boggy Creek fire station near Fouke, Ark., caught fire.

By the time department members returned, 15 minutes after the fire was reported, flames and smoke were pouring from the roof of the metal building facing U.S. Highway 71. When the blaze was extinguished with the help of neighboring departments, the building and its contents were a loss.

An initial report filed by Miller County Sheriff’s Office indicated the blaze began in the southeastern corner of the building, an area being converted to an office.  The case was assigned to a criminal investigator, but no investigation documents were ever filed. The case is open.

After some confusion over whether the station had been insured, Miller County’s insurer paid $61,690.86 for the building and its contents. Its report attributed the fire to an “apparent electrical short.”

In the eight years it took to rebuild the station, more than half of the insurance money was spent fighting an avoidable lawsuit. Thousands more were found to be stolen, spent on botched land deals and paid directly to a volunteer fire chief.

‘A stupid thing’
Just two months after his station burned, Reggie Watkins, then chief of Boggy Creek VFD, had a fire of his own.

The house belonging to Watkins and wife Crystal caught fire on March 20, destroying the home and most of its contents. When the insurance company refused to pay on the claim, the Watkins sued.

The case went to trial, and on April 18, 2004, a jury decided in favor of Farm Bureau Mutual Insurance Company of Arkansas Inc. They ruled that the fire had been set by or on behalf of the Watkins. No criminal charges were ever filed.

Included in court documents is what Farm Bureau proposed as a motive for setting the fire: A confession was signed by Watkins admitting that he stole $9,424.95 from Boggy Creek. The amount missing was later reduced to a little more than $7,000.

According to documents on file at the Miller County Rural Volunteer Fire Department training center in Genoa, Watkins pilfered the money by submitting receipts multiple times for reimbursement and pocketing cash intended for Boggy Creek’s bank accounts. A $1,500 invoice, supposedly for work done on a fire truck, was a fake.

“It was a stupid thing,” Watkins said in a recent interview. “I was young, and it was a very stupid thing to do.”

Miller County Rural Fire Department has nine units—Boggy Creek, Booker Bridge, Bright Star, Doddridge, Genoa, Mandeville, Pleasant Hill, Satellite and Trinity.

According to meeting minutes,  the department took the theft to Prosecuting Attorney Brent Haltom. Haltom, now an 8th Judicial District circuit judge, advised the department to handle the matter internally.

Haltom said fire department issues were often brought to his attention when he was prosecuting attorney. He said he doesn’t remember discussing Reggie Watkins’ theft, though he said he would not have advised the department to handle it internally.

“We’d either advise them to go to the state police or the sheriff’s office. … That’s just the policy of the office,” Haltom said.

Watkins met with the Miller County Rural governing board, of which he was a member, in April 2003 and agreed to resign from the department. A few days later, he submitted his resignation as division chief over Trinity, Pleasant Hill and Mandeville VFDs and left Boggy Creek for good.

“I paid all of what I took. Plus, I paid more than that,” Watkins said. “And the reason I done that is because I didn’t want any questions, and it was paid in full, and it’s dead, and it’s over with.”

‘It burned’
Even before Watkins’ departure, Boggy Creek was looking for land on which to build a station.

At the February 2003 meeting of the Miller County Rural board, less than three weeks after the fire, Watkins asked if Boggy Creek could operate in the red to purchase a plot of land he had found. The proposal was voted down pending an insurance settlement, and the search for new land continued.

The old station was at the intersection of Highway 71 and County Road 24, about 3 1/2 miles south of Fouke. But most of the department’s volunteers lived on the other side of the city, said Tommy Crank, who succeeded Watkins as chief.

“I lived 10 miles from it,” Crank said. “To put a fire out at my house, I had to drive 20 miles. That made no sense to me.”

Crank began looking for land on the outskirts of Fouke, nearer to where most of the firefighters lived. In December 2003, the Miller County Rural board approved the purchase of 3 acres, but the land was never purchased.

In the meantime, the department was trying to find a way out of the 30-year, $100-permonth lease it had signed with Ricky Pilgreen in 1997, when the original Boggy Creek station was constructed.

“It was sort of a community service deal,” said Pilgreen, who still owns the land but lives mainly in Arizona. “I wasn’t really using the land. They came to me about buying stuff in that area. Then they came back to me later and asked would I be interested in leasing an acre right there on the corner. I said sure.”

Pilgreen said that shortly after Watkins took over as chief, he heard from a friend that Watkins was trying to sell or lease the buildings. He also said his home insurance went up after his insurer informed him that no fire trucks were being kept at the station.

According to Pilgreen, he confronted Watkins, who said he wanted out of the lease. Pilgreen told Watkins that would be fine as long as the fire department would forfeit the building, per the terms of the lease agreement.

“Then, a few months later, it burned,” Pilgreen said.

Watkins maintains that he began looking for new land only after the station burned. He said trucks were always kept at the station, though others were kept at members’ houses for faster response times.

He said he and other department members had been doing electrical work at the station, and that an electrical short, combined with a gas leak, ignited the blaze.

“It was all accidental,” Watkins said. “Nobody set that fire.”

According to the May 2004 minutes of the Miller County Rural board, Pilgreen’s wife was assured that Boggy Creek would be rebuilt on the leased land. But the department continued to search for a way out of the lease and, in February 2005, stopped making its monthly payment.

On July 24, 2005, Pilgreen sued the department, Watkins and two others for breach of contract and for deliberately leaving the property in unusable condition. (The burned out shell of the station stood until earlier this year. The concrete pad and a small pile of debris remained as of last month).

The suit also alleged that Watkins, the first person on the scene according to the sheriff’s office report, had instructed his firefighters to let the fire burn. Watkins denies the allegation.

In all, Pilgreen sought nearly $200,000 in damages. The case against the individual defendants was eventually dismissed, and Pilgreen settled with the department for $16,000.

The department ended up paying about $17,600 in attorney’s fees. Two-thirds of that amount went to pay for separate attorneys for Watkins and former Miller County Rural chairwoman Peggy Mauldin, who were no longer with the department.

All told, the lawsuit cost the department more than $33,000 in funds earmarked for rebuilding the station. The department is no longer welcome on Pilgreen’s property.

“I don’t want nothing to do with that bunch of peckerwoods,” Pilgreen said.

‘Depends on who you ask’
In December 2005, the Miller County Rural board approved paying Crank $350 for storing Boggy Creek’s fire trucks and equipment at his home for the previous month.

Crank said the payment was proposed by another firefighter. He accepted because the equipment filled the shop he had just built behind his house for an unrelated purpose, and for which he was paying $350 per month.

“I couldn’t use my shop, because I kept the trucks in there,” he said.

The money, which was paid from Boggy Creek’s tax account, comes from a 1-percent sales tax approved by Miller County voters in 1988, a portion of which was allocated to Miller County Rural.

The exact amount varies, but Miller County Rural receives well over $100,000 per year in sales tax money that is divided evenly between the nine departments and a general fund.

While Crank was keeping the trucks at his home, the search for a new station crept forward. In March 2005, shortly before Pilgreen filed the lawsuit, Boggy Creek purchased a piece of land on Highway 71 from Lynda Williams and Terri White, two followers of Tony Alamo, for $100.

Alamo had offered to provide Boggy Creek with land and a station near his ministry in Fouke, Crank said. A concrete pad was poured a few months after the land sale, but work quickly ground to a halt.

“(Alamo) was mad and wouldn’t finish the paperwork,” Crank said.

Alamo’s change of heart kept progress on the station stalled for 17 months. Crank told the board at its December 2006 meeting that the rebuilding process was back to square one.

Eight months later, Crank found another possible location, and the board agreed to purchase 1 1/2 acres abutting Fouke city limits for $5,000. The sellers were Danny and Cynthia Burns, Crank’s sister and brother-in-law.

Crank said he doesn’t think the family connection presented a conflict of interest.

“I guess it depends on who you ask,” he said. “I had been looking all over to get land all around Fouke, and that had come up really fast.”

The start of construction hit another snag when it was discovered that the property had several liens placed against it, and there was confusion over the ownership of the property. It took almost two years and a $910.50 payment to attorney Karlton Kemp to settle the confusion.

Then, heavy rains and damp conditions postponed work for another six months.

It wasn’t until June 2010 that Crank solicited for bids in the classifieds section of the Gazette. The lowest bid, for $55,000, was submitted by C.A.S. Construction. The company is owned by Crank’s brother, Larry Wayne Crank.

Crank said the decision to use his brother was purely financial. The company’s bid was more than $10,000 lower than either of the two other bids received, according to documents provided by current Boggy Creek chief Charles Bennett.

The building was substantially complete by the end of the year, and, for the first time in nearly eight years, Boggy Creek’s fire trucks were returned to a fire station.

By that time, Crank had kept the trucks in his shop for a full five years and had collected $21,000 in storage fees from the department.

Crank remains a member of Boggy Creek and is a division chief over three other departments.

‘Moving forward’
The new fire station is a plain building of corrugated metal set back a few feet from North Burgess Road and Fouke city limits.

Mayor Terry Purvis is happy to have the new neighbor. The city’s fire station is only a mile away, but Purvis said he appreciates all the backup he can get.

The new station will be good for residents living outside the city limits as well, Purvis said.

Boggy Creek, like the other rural departments in Miller County, have a Class 9 ISO rating.

The rating measures a department’s ability to respond to and fight structure fires, with lower numbers indicating better fire protection. Lower ratings also correspond to lower homeowners’ insurance premiums. Fouke’s ISO rating of 7 extends only to its city limits, while Boggy Creek’s extends to a radius of 5 road miles.

With the new station, residents outside of Fouke will likely see their insurance payments drop, Purvis said.

The opposite, however, is also true. Residents within five miles of the old Boggy Creek station could see their insurance premiums rise.

But those decisions have been made, and Bennett plans to move forward with the department’s main task of fighting fires. He hopes to secure grants to purchase new trucks, which will help lower the ISO rating.

“We’re just trying to keep moving forward and get rid of the past,” Bennett said. “We’ve got some bad publicity in the past, but we’re looking to change all that.”