Tenants at Davenport apartment unhappy after fire damage goes days without being fixed

Days after an apartment fire in Davenport, tenants are fired up.

Multiple tenants of Castlewood Apartments in Davenport are unhappy with the condition of their building five days after a fire broke out in a unit on the building’s second floor. According to multiple sources, the fire occurred Friday night at approximately 11 p.m. and left three units in the building damaged. The impacted tenants said this week they are frustrated with how long it took for their building to be cleaned and repaired.

Local 4 News reached out to Dominium Apartments, the parent company of Castlewood Apartments, for a statement on the fire. A spokesperson from Dominium sent back a statement today, saying crews began work to fix the fire damage on Monday, three days after the fire occurred. “The fire remediation team has been onsite since early Monday to repair the damage to the individual units and common areas impacted by the fire,” read the statement.

Furthermore, the spokesperson said in the statement that the impacted renters were offered, “the opportunity to move to another vacant unit on the property while theirs was being repaired.” However, one of the impacted renters, Jessamine Whitehouse, said on Tuesday that they were not offered any vacant unit, and stayed in their damaged apartment the same night the fire was put out.

“If we were in nicer, in a nicer complex where we paid, say like 900 dollars a month in rent, none of us would be there,” Whitehouse said. “We would be in either new units or hotels for a week or two.”

Jim Morris, Davenport fire marshal, visited the building on Tuesday to investigate the damage, and said that upon his visit, the apartment appeared safe to live in again.

“They had a cleanup crew on site and were doing a very nice job of mitigating any issues that were left over from the fire,” Morris said. “I did not smell any residual smoke, there was no staining on the walls.”

Morris added that Castlewood Apartments may have needed time to get a fire remediation crew to help.

“You have to give the complex time to get the resources and get the restoration company in there, and sometimes it’s dependent on availability of companies that can do it and their equipment.”

Morris said the investigation as to what caused the fire is ongoing.