Residential Hotel Fire Leaves a Cloud of Fear, Uncertainty : Arson: The Wilmington blaze renders 46 people homeless and makes their struggle with life even more difficult.

After 20 years of living in the Old South Hotel in Wilmington, Pablo Romero finally had purchased enough of life’s little luxuries to turn his $180-a-month room into a comfortable home.

On Sunday afternoon, his simple dreams went up in smoke as an arson fire roared through the residential hotel, leaving Romero and 46 other people--at least a third of them children--homeless.

“I was content. I’d bought everything I’d wanted, made the place how I wanted it,” Romero, 71, said in Spanish on Monday as he cuddled a friend’s 6-week-old daughter at an emergency shelter and waited to talk to Red Cross workers about finding somewhere new to live.

“Now, I’m nervous because I don’t know where I’ll go or how much I’ll have to pay,” he said, shrugging and smiling wanly. “I just thank God I’m alive.”

Many of the tired and dazed neighbors surrounding him on cots and benches in the Wilmington Recreation Center said they feel the same.

“I was scared to death. After I got out, I was glad to have made it, but I kept thinking, what if everything I left up there is gone? What if I lose it all?” said George Otts, 64, who had just moved into his $275-per-month room last week after he was evicted from a trailer that he had lived in for more than eight years.

Otts, however, was one of many lucky ones. Although his room was soaked by the water sprayed on the flames by 75 firefighters, most of his belongings survived the blaze.

“I left my glasses sitting by the TV, and I was really worried about them,” he said, pointing to the spectacles on his face. “After it was all over, they let me go back in and get them. I’ll tell you, I’m happy to be able to see again.”

Fourteen fire companies battled the fire, which began in a vacant garage next to the two-story, faded blue clapboard hotel, city fire spokesman Michael Little said. Although firefighters knocked down the blaze in 36 minutes, it destroyed the rear part of the building, causing more than $500,000 in damage, he said. Little said investigators have not found a motive.

Because residents and police ran quickly through the building in the 700 block of North Flint Street, pounding on doors to warn people of the fire, none of the 46 residents were injured.

But the fire has made their struggle to make ends meet all the more difficult, they said.

David Gutierrez, 34, who had lived in the hotel with his wife and their 2-year-old daughter for just over a month, said he recently was laid off from his job in a fast-food restaurant.

Although his wife, Inocencia, has a job in a bakery, she fears she will lose it for good after their second child, due in December, is born.

“We have nowhere to stay, nowhere to go,” David Gutierrez said in Spanish. “Everything we owned--all the appliances, all our clothes, all our jewelry--it’s gone.

“We’re not angry, because we don’t know what happened or who did it, but we’re scared,” he said. “What’s going to happen to us?”