MADISON, Wis.– The smell of smoke still lingers above a boarded up building. The outside remains mostly intact, the inside is gutted.
Madison firefighters responded to a fire at 1304 Culmen Street just after 6:30 on Sunday morning. The building is home to Vinny’s Lockers, a place where people facing homelessness could keep their belongings safe.
“I believe we had 50 plus people with goods in current storage, ” St. Vincent de Paul of Dane County CEO Ernie Stetenfeld said. “A fire like this means that is has been lost.”
A safe, full of birth certificates, documents and family pictures, is one of the few things that survived. All other goods were destroyed.
Firefighters are investing what caused the fire.
The fire at Vinny’s Lockers was the City of Madison’s first call since taking over for the Town of Madison Fire Department.
“We started to provide service at midnight on Nov. 1,” Chief Steven Davis said.
The City of Madison Fire Department agreed to take on the town’s department ahead of the city’s annexation in 2022. Davis said the transition is going smoothly.
“When the fire call came in around 6:00 in the morning, (dispatch) put the address in and the Madison Fire Department popped up as the responding agency,” Davis said. “They sent the appropriate vehicles, and we went in and put the fire out like we do.”
Volunteers at St. Vincent de Paul are trying to contact people who kept their belongings in the building, a hard task when many don’t have cell phones.
“They don’t have much, but what they have therefore is all the more precious,” Stetenfeld said. “What they have, typically, they have to carry on their person.”
Stetenfeld the building is no longer usable. They’re looking at the possibility of finding a new place to rebuild.
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