Chemical company has yet to pay family 2 years after fire destroys legacy

CHEROKEE COUNTY, Ga. — Two years after a raging fire destroyed a family's legacy, the chemical company responsible has yet to pay up.

"I think it's a terrible thing to dangle hope in front of someone who has lost everything," said Hunter Young, the son of the property's owner.

His mother, Wanda Young, says when the fire first happened, executives from Zep, Inc., which owns the Amrep warehouse that caught fire, were compassionate.

"I think that I had the good people that really wanted to do the right thing," she said. "And all of a sudden the rug was jerked out from under me."

The fire started at the Amrep facility on May 23, 2014. It lit up the night sky from Cherokee County all the way to downtown Atlanta. Every few minutes, chemical explosions would rock the surrounding area.

Wanda Young and her son, Hunter, got the call that their warehouse, just 10 feet from the Amrep property, was also on fire.

"The smell was horrendous, and it was just like unbelievable right before our eyes," Wanda Young said.

She and Hunter had already lost a great deal.

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Just three months earlier, her husband, Clay, died of cancer.

The Young warehouse served as his office and workspace, packed with collectible cars, racing equipment and years of memories from his career as a NASCAR driver.

"He would be sad to see the remnants of his legacy just basically melted away," Hunter Young said.

It's a sadness the 23-year-old couldn't describe as he walked through the sacred place he spent so many weekends with his dad.

"After he passed this was somewhere me and my mother could come and see the things that reminded us of him, and they were taken away too," Hunter Young said.

Records show the fire started in an old storage building, on the Amrep property, the closest point to the family's warehouse.

The explosions blew through brick and concrete block walls, even melting steel beams.

The company lacked safety measures which could have kept the fire from spreading, and a city policy allowed it.

"I feel if the sprinklers had been there, my building would still be here," Wanda Young said.

In fact, Marietta Fire Marshal Tim Milligan says the part of the Amrep facility that had sprinklers fared very well.

But the warehouse next door to the Young family's property was leveled.

Because it was built in the 1960s, it was grandfathered in and allowed to store volatile chemicals up to a certain amount without having sprinklers.

"After that fire there was nothing left to see," said Milligan, adding that there was no way to determine the chemicals and quantities stored in that warehouse, except to take the company's word for it.

"According to their commodity assessment, they had everything they should have had in there, and nothing more," Milligan said.

He says the company was previously called out for having more hazardous chemicals than it should in a different area and rented extra space to comply with the law.

Milligan says the company wanted to house even more in the warehouse next to the Young's too, and were midway through installing a fire suppression system when the fire happened.

"I don't understand how one could be grandfathered in to storing hazardous chemicals that could do this without any sort of fire suppression system," Hunter Young said.

His mother was equally baffled. "I went on the assumption that, when you have property like that and you have chemicals on site, that someone is out there with the general public's back," she said.

To make matters worse, the family struggled financially while her late husband, Clay, was sick, so their building had no insurance.

Zep Inc. is self-insured and has yet to pay the Young family anything for their loss.

"I don't understand how people could see the harm they've caused and just be completely unwilling to accept responsibility for it," Hunter Young said.

Their attorney says Zep has twice fired its own appraisers the company brought in to value the Young property.

"The folks at the adjusting firm told my client that they thought that the contents of the building were even more valuable than the damage to the building itself," said Lee Davis, the family's attorney.

Wanda Young says when the fire first happened, she met with company executives who verbally agreed on how to assess the value of what the family lost.

But then the company got sold, the executives got replaced and the family, so far, has gotten nothing.

"They evaluated the building and when it came to contents they shut the process down," Wanda Young said.

To make matters worse, now that the family's building has been sitting for more than two years, it's racking up code enforcement violations, sending Wanda to court with threats of jail.

She says that's when the company finally offered her a settlement, but for the building's value, not the contents.

"They were very important, that was my husband's life in there," she said.

The fire and fight that followed have now tainted the family's memories, and taken away the place they cherished.

"My main goal now is to leave this property to put this behind me," Wanda Young said.

A representative from Zep has refused to answer any of Channel 2's questions about the fire or Wand Young's case.

The former executive, who she says handled things the "right way," also declined to comment, saying Zep hired an attorney to represent him in Wanda Young's lawsuit against the company.

A few emails from that executive outline the agreed-upon plans to value the Young's property, but there was no official agreement in writing.

In its response to her lawsuit, attorneys for Zep argued that conversation was merely an "agreement to negotiate," not an enforceable contract under Georgia law.

The company produced aerosol automotive and cleaning products, and had been fined repeatedly over the years for air quality and safety violations. There had also been several prior incidents of fire, including at least two that severely injured employees.

Milligan says the cause of the 2014 fire is still undetermined, but he considers it a firefighting success since no one was hurt or killed.

Cox Media Group