The Town That Won't Stop Burning

Tom Kelly IV, Daily Local News / AP Photo The small, unassuming town of Coatesville, Pennsylvania, has suffered 50 fires in 15 months, making it the site of the country's worst arson epidemic in decades, and providing a frightening case study in how the crime of fire-setting can turn self-perpetuating. The Daily Beast reports from a city under siege. PLUS, watch original video of Coatesville's residents talking about living in a town terrorized by arsonists.

On a barren stretch of Stode Avenue, across the street from the boarded-up house where an 83-year-old Holocaust survivor died in a December arson, the conversation is about the fires.

“See, they ain’t got nobody gang-related,” a young man who calls himself Blue says of the arsonists terrorizing this town. Blue is 23, wears an oversize hoodie, has his hair in tight cornrows, and a hard look in his eyes. “They only pick on old people.” Three black girls are sitting with him on the porch of a two-story house listening to music, laughing. Most people don’t spend much time on porches in Coatesville these days. Officials have asked residents to remove their porch furniture, trash cans—anything that could be easily set aflame.

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Coatesville residents talk about life since the arsons began

Like Blue, everyone in Coatesville seems to have a theory about the fires—even though no one knows what’s going on for sure. Since February 2008, this broken Rust Belt town in southeastern Pennsylvania, population 11,000, has been the scene of some 50 arsons, making it the site of what one Web site for firefighters called the country’s worst arson epidemic since the 1980s. Shells of burned houses are everywhere, their windows covered in plywood, or their charred structures open to the weather. One fire burned an entire city block, akin to the immolation of an entire neighborhood in a town less than two square miles in area.

But even after 50 separate incidents, no one knows who’s burning the city, or why it keeps happening. So far, the police have netted seven suspects—and zero convictions. The arsonists’ motives are unclear, and the fires follow no apparent pattern. Like the D.C. sniper shootings, the Coatesville arsons are a perfect storm of a crime problem: a series of violent acts that, while apparently related, seem indecipherably random.

Which makes them all the more terrifying for the residents of Coatesville. On the east side of town, in the living room of his modest two-story rowhouse, Michael Hardy has two couches in his living room. They’re positioned next to the front door. Like so many in Coatesville, Hardy and his girlfriend don’t sleep in their bedrooms anymore. They’ve camped out in their living room, hoping they can make a quick escape if their house begins to burn. “I’ll be sleeping, and any small noise I hear, I’ll wake up,” Hardy says. “We got to get out of the house fast because you never know what’s going on.” Life in Coatesville has become frightening enough that the Guardian Angels, who famously patrolled New York’s crime-ridden subway system in the 1970s, are opening a new chapter here.