I live just south of Maple Road, which is also known as 15 Mile Road. Rap fans may recognize this as 7 miles north of “8 Mile Road” - which is the border of Detroit City limits. Yes, there were fires here tonight. CNNFn.com has taken to documenting stories about Detroit this year, they tell the story pretty vividly here:
“DETROIT (CNNMoney.com) — Most people assume the Packard Plant in Detroit is vacant. It’s an industrial ruin where the last car was manufactured 53 years ago.
Almost all the windows are blown out. Collapsed walls litter the overgrown sidewalks with broken bricks, mixed with charred metal and shattered glass.
But one tenant remains headquartered among the vines, rust and graffiti. Where 11,000 employees once clocked in, now just 10 workers for Chemical Processing Inc. show up each morning.
See photos of the Packard Plant ruins
Running a business in a facility widely assumed to be deserted has its challenges. The address surprises customers. The landlord doesn’t make repairs. And sometimes, scrappers steal your power lines.
It’s happened to Chemical Processing President Bruce Kafarski a half-dozen times in past two years. “People kept cutting down the electric lines for the copper,” he says. “The city would replace the lines with aluminum, but the scrappers wouldn’t know that till they got them down and looked. We’d be left for a day or two without power.”
Kafarski is remarkably unfazed by this. He’s equally calm about the fires.
Detroit has an arson problem — one that peaks each year in late October. This Friday, the night before Halloween, is known locally as Devil’s Night, an evening when firebugs take to the streets to torch empty buildings. In the ’80s and early ’90s, it really was hellish, residents say. As many as 800 dwellings went up in flames each year. Then the city cracked down and began marshaling thousands of volunteers to patrol the streets. The fire count fell — a bit.
But at the Packard Plant, any day can be Devil’s Night.
“During the summer the Detroit Fire Department was going there almost every day,” says Jason Frattini, a firefighter with the nearby city of Eastpointe who sometimes goes by with his camera to document the Packard Plant blazes.
In this vast, 3.5-million-square-foot labyrinth, small fires turn into big ones before anyone takes notice. But Chemical Processing has stayed safe from the flames. When something ignites nearby, Kafarski and his workers intervene. Last summer, for example, Kafarski found a fire smoldering just one floor above.
“There happened to be a pool of water nearby,” Kafarski says. “I got a cup and a bucket. It was pretty easy to put out.”
After 51 years in the Packard Plant, it takes a lot to ruffle Kafarski.
His father started the company in a garage just after World War II, joining Detroit’s mass of independent auto suppliers. Chemical Processing specializes in industrial finishing services, coating small metal parts like car door latches and gears. Work for Ford’s (F, Fortune 500) suppliers brings in a big chunk of the company’s sales.
When Packard Motor Car Co. merged with Studebaker and shut down its Detroit plant, other industrial firms took up residence in the cavernous space. In the 1960s, Chemical Processing had around 90 employees working three full shifts. Its neighbors included shipping companies, manufacturers and dozens of other auto suppliers.
But the plant was too vast for the city once it began losing its industrial base. By the late 1990s, it had become a decaying eyesore the city wanted to demolish. After a long court battle, the city foreclosed on the owner for unpaid taxes and seized control of the building. In 1997 it ordered the remaining 87 tenants to leave. Most did.”
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