Publisher Sam Houston urges officials to pursue fire sprinklers after Gatesville downtown blaze

Sam Houston, publisher of the Hood County News and chief operating officer of Hyde Media, told a joint session of the city council and zoning commission that a March 16 downtown Gatesville fire that gutted multiple historic buildings shows the need to prioritize fire sprinklers on Granbury's square.

Houston said he was notified around 6:30 p.m. that evening after his office manager drove to the square and saw smoke coming from a bail bondsman's office. He described frantic early moments as firefighters gained entry and flames rapidly spread to adjacent buildings, including the Gatesville Messenger and Laird's Furniture. "Within minutes, flames shot out of our 3 story roof over 30 feet in the air," Houston said, and later told council members insurers had declared the Messenger a total loss.

The fire caused no reported injuries to responders, Houston said, but he called the damage "immeasurable," noting the loss of more than 100 years of archive material documenting Coryell County and Gatesville and that entire west-side commercial blocks built around 1890'1910 were destroyed or reduced to hollow walls. "Picture the city of San Antonio without the Alamo. Granbury without a square is not the same place," he said, urging officials to treat the square as an essential civic asset.

As a concrete step, Houston urged the council and the zoning commission to consider requiring fire sprinklers in businesses on the square. "The only way I know to prevent this from happening here is to install fire sprinklers in every business on the Square," he said. He acknowledged that some buildings already have sprinklers but said many do not and that owners often cannot afford retrofits.

Houston said he had spoken with fire inspectors and insurance adjusters who told him that sprinklers would likely have reduced the destruction: "They all agreed if there had been sprinklers in these buildings, we'd had a mess. It had been hard to clean up. I would have hated it, but the buildings would have been there and we could have gone on." He also recalled a city effort about three years earlier to promote sprinkler installation that stalled over financing concerns.

Houston asked council and commission members to look into grant options, budgeting strategies or other financing to make sprinkler retrofits feasible for building owners, noting the square's importance to tourism and the local economy. The chair thanked Houston after his presentation; the transcript records no formal motion, vote, or directive in response during the same session.