|
Home
Detroit’s Messiah Covenant Building Escapes Fire’s Wrath
DETROIT, MI (October 26, 2006) – Messiah Covenant Church suffered minor smoke damage and was forced to cancel Wednesday activities when fire destroyed an abandoned building next to the church building, says pastor Bob Hoey.
Firefighters battled the blaze for nearly 23 hours, Hoey says. Officials initially feared the building contained hazardous materials and they evacuated the neighborhood for about five hours.
It was the third major fire in close proximity to Messiah in three months, Hoey says. Another large abandoned building adjacent to the church was destroyed in an earlier blaze, and materials previously removed from the structure also caught fire in a separate conflagration. “Two of them have been three-alarm fires,” Hoey says.
The latest multiple-alarm fire started around 3 p.m. Tuesday. Smoke was so thick that it almost obscured the church, which could not be seen from across the street.
“People were crying thinking they were watching our church going up in flames,” Hoey says. “It’s a miracle the church is still in one piece.”
Hoey’s wife, Evelyn, operates a private school in the church and says she has implored the city several times to do something about the abandoned buildings. “They’re an accident waiting to happen,” Bob Hoey says.
A cause for the fire has not been determined.
Messiah is located in an inner city neighborhood containing a number of abandoned buildings. The church has helped spark the growth of Covenant congregations in the Detroit area that have gone from two to seven since 1999, when Messiah was adopted into the Evangelical Covenant Church denomination.
Copyright © 2008 The Evangelical Covenant Church. |
|
|
|
