CLEVELAND, Tenn. - Joey Wells lost his home and his business in one night.
Wells, who operated a small one-story secondhand shop called J&R Furniture, on Hardwick St. in South Cleveland, said he was adding gas to the generator underneath his business Wednesday evening when the machine caught on fire, ignited the floor, and hurled the store into flames.
"It's chained up on a pipe in there to keep people from stealing it," he said. "I couldn't get it out from under the building. I yanked it, pulled it, and I remembered that I had it chained. By then all I could do was get out."
Wells, who ran the business for 11 years, said he lost everything.
"This is the only way I made my living," he said. "I have no mother, no father, no relatives. This is it, man. This is all I've got."
With no home, the business sufficed, but now that it's gone, Wells said he doesn't know what to do.
"I was sleeping here at night," he said. "I know it's against the law and I know it's against the codes."
Because he used the building for storage and didn't open it to the public, Wells was permitted not to connect water or electric lines, he said. So he used the generator to get power.
An ambulance driver riding past the building initially spotted the fire around 8:30 p.m. and called the fire department, Stan Clark, spokesperson for the Bradley County EMS, said.
"It was a pretty good raging fire when they got here," he said. "It burned rather quickly due to all the furniture and stuff inside."
Misty Dixon and her mother-in-law Linda Blankenship just moved to the house beside the store and came outside when they heard sirens from their living room.
"All that smoke come boilin' in and we grabbed towels and put 'em around our head and our eyes because it was burning our eyes," Blankenship said.
Blankenship said that when her family has supper she normally carries a plate to Wells if they have extra. She said she was worried he was asleep in the building when it caught on fire.
As the blaze raged on, the two stood in the road and used towels to wave oncoming drivers away from the scene, Blankenship said.
Both said they shopped at the store a few times, mostly because of the prices, and that Wells did a good business despite the constant threat of theft.
Ben Atchley, an arson investigator for the Cleveland Fire Department, said the building suffered extensive damage.
"It was so cluttered up," he said. "It had a lot of used furniture inside it so it was very unsafe to be in there with the fire overhead because you couldn't walk around."
Rebuilding the shop would likely be cost-prohibitive, Atchley said, due to the expense to bring it up to current code.
Atchley said gas generators need proper ventilation to work, not an enclosed area like a crawlspace.
The shop's owner, Jim Clark, 79, of Ringgold, Ga., said the building, which is more than 60 years old, was built to be a house and later used as a restaurant.
"You can look at it and tell it's totaled," Clark said. "I didn't have insurance, if that makes any difference."
Clark said that on several occasions he offered to help Wells find a place to live, but that Wells always said he was on the lookout himself.
Last night after the fire was extinguished, Wells pulled his truck in front of the store and went to sleep, protecting what little he had left, orphaned furniture scattered around the shop's charred remains. That's all he has.
"There ain't nothing in the building worth getting out," he said. "A bulldozer will take care of all of it."