ChickSpeak

The ChickSpeak community mourns the tragic loss of the 7 University of South Carolina and Clemson students who lost their lives in the fire on Ocean Isle Beach.  

The following article is from New York Times today. Two university campuses were gripped by grief this morning, a day after a fast-moving fire swept through a beach house at a resort in North Carolina and killed seven college students during a weekend getaway.

As investigators continued to sift through the rubble and worked to identify victims, students at the University of South Carolina, where six of the victims had been students, were in mourning. The seventh victim, whose identity was still unclear, had reportedly been a student at Clemson University. Six students survived.

The fire broke out at about 7 a.m. Sunday at a beach house on Ocean Isle Beach on the southern end of North Carolina’s Atlantic shore, about 30 miles north of Myrtle Beach. Witnesses described seeing people jumping out of windows, screaming and struggling to get out as the fire raced through the first and second floors of the home. The house, a two-story structure on stilts, was eventually consumed by flames, and nearly all that remained of the structure this morning was a charred frame.

It was unclear how the fire started, but officials with the Brunswick County Emergency Management agency said there were signs that it began on a deck area on the first level and then spread upward to the top level. The home’s ground level, which was used for parking, sustained only slight damage.

Dennis Pruitt, the University of South Carolina’s dean of students, said many of the students staying in the house were members of the Delta Delta Delta sorority or the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity. The six survivors were hospitalized and released from Brunswick Community hospital nearby. Officials said it could take until Wednesday before the identities of the victims are officially released, but several friends and relatives of the dead said they had been notified by 5 p.m. Sunday.

For the full story in the New York Times 

By ANAHAD O’CONNOR and PATRICK GANNON

Published: October 29, 2007

Photo credit to Logan Mock-Bunting/Getty Images