On November 27, 2000, at 10:30 p.m., Fairfax County, Virginia, Fire and Rescue received a call from the Fairfax County Police Department reporting a fire at the Dogwood Elementary School in Reston, Virginia.  The school was built in 1974 in an “open classroom” design with demountable partitions as “walls” between groups of four and six classrooms and between classrooms and halls.  Measuring approximately 300’ by 300’, the school was a one story, noncombustible steel frame building with masonry exterior walls. Dogwood served grades kindergarten through six.

The school security monitoring station received an intrusion alarm from the north side of the school at 10:17 p.m.  This was the first detected activity in a sequence of events likely related to the fire.  Fire dispatch was alerted of the alarm at 10:36 p.m. and the first fire department units were dispatched at that time. Fire suppression personnel from Fairfax Fire Station 31 arrived at 10:41 p.m., within five minutes of dispatch.  There were no authorized or known individuals in the school at the time of the fire; thus, no evacuation of occupants was necessary.

The fire progressed so rapidly and was burning so intensely that the first arriving fire department units quickly had to be moved and positioned further away from the building at a safe distance.  During the two days of fire suppression operations, 100 firefighters and 35 units responded to the scene.

Determination of origin and cause was hampered by the extent of damage and the enormity of the dig-out, which required participation from numerous agencies and subcontractors over a two-week period of time.  The school, valued at $12 million, was declared a total loss as a result of the fire.  Eight months after the fire, following an intensive, thorough investigation, investigators determined the cause of the fire to be an electrical short in the building’s plenum space, with the origin in Quadrant B of the structure.