The Town That Won't Stop Burning

AP Photo With so many fires, public officials here believe it’s not a solitary arsonist who’s responsible for the fires, but rather many arsonists working in isolation—separate individuals who may not even know each other. Which raises the chilling question: Are the arsons in Coatesville begetting more arsons?

A certain type of arson has a way of becoming self-perpetuating, says Dian Williams, founder of the Center for Arson Research in Philadelphia. She says multiple arsons can provide cover for people to commit even more of them: “If you want to commit an act of revenge, there’s nothing like a series of fires going on for you to dash in and commit your own deed, because it could get lost in the mix.” Arson is also a crime people tend to get away with—less than one-fifth of all arson cases are successfully prosecuted—and the more people get away with it, the less likely the consequences seem. “There are generally no eyewitnesses” to arsons, says Williams. “You have a very low potentiality of people confessing, and the chances you’re going to be able to identify them with very little direct physical evidence that ties them to the scene, it’s a very small chance.”

“I’ll be sleeping, and any small noise I hear, I’ll wake up,” says one resident. “We got to get out of the house fast because you never know what’s going on.”

Complicating things further, revenge-driven arsonists aren’t necessarily seeking revenge on the specific person whose property they burn. They could feel vengeful in a more abstract sense, like laid-off employees who shoot up their old offices. “Timothy McVeigh was a revenge arsonist of a certain type for very particular reasons of his own,” says Williams. (She says fire-bombers like McVeigh also qualify as arsonists.) “He had a lot of animosity toward the federal government, he was enraged by the events that took place at Waco, he was unhappy about his treatment in the U.S. military, and so he enacted revenge against the government, feeling that it needed to be taught a lesson.”

The AP's January 25, 2009 report on the fires

One could imagine similar feelings of resentment in a town like Coatesville, which was, until relatively recently, a comfortable middle-class hamlet where much of the tight-knit community worked at the local steel mill. When the steel company was bought out in 2003 and drastically downsized, unemployment soared. People’s pensions disappeared. Today, a quarter of the population lives below the poverty line, and a kind of nihilism enshrouds its younger black population: A local “fight club” posts videos on YouTube, MySpace pages boast of the town’s nickname “Cook Cokeville,” aspirational graffiti marks the territory of wannabe Bloods and Crips. Coatesville's population is about 50 percent African American.

Take the sense of bitterness that can be caused by such a rapid decline in fortune, combine it with the town’s high poverty rate—an Australian study last year found a correlation between rising poverty and increased arson incidents—and you have the prime conditions to spark an arson epidemic.

But Coatesville doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and the towns in surrounding Chester County harbor their own thinly veiled resentment of the small, troubled city in their midst. The county district attorney, Joseph Carroll, says that many of Chester County’s violent crimes were perpetrated by citizens of Coatesville, where gun crime has nearly doubled over the past two years. Getting Coatesville under control, Carroll said, “will be beneficial to the entire county.”