At Thursday’s inaugural Detroit Story Fest event at the Detroit Film Theatre, Metro Times reporter Steve Neavling recounted his journey covering fires for a year through his independent project Motor City Muckraker. Below is a transcription of his story.
I lay in the back of an ambulance with an oxygen mask pressed to my face. My heart was pounding. Tears streamed down my face.
I was losing my job at the Detroit Free Press, where I had worked for six years. The medic kept telling me, “It’s going to be OK. It’s going to be OK.” But I wasn’t so sure. I had worked so hard to get where I was — the late nights, the relentless hustle, the sacrifices. And now, it felt like everything was slipping away, just as Detroit was sliding into bankruptcy.
When we arrived at the hospital, I learned I wasn’t having a heart attack. I wasn’t going to die. It was just a panic attack.
The next few weeks were a blur. I felt angry and sad and full of shame.
At the time, I lived in a loft in Midtown with my girlfriend Abby and our two Jack Russells. Abby was in college, and with no steady income, we were forced to move to a low-income apartment on Detroit’s east side. It was there — inside that cramped, 500-square-foot apartment — that I decided to take a risk.
If Detroit had taught me anything — it was to never give up. So instead of waiting for a job, Abby and I created one. We started an independent investigative news site called Motor City Muckraker. It was a nod to the old-school reporters who exposed corruption.
But here’s the thing about starting a news site with no resources — you don’t get paid. But that wasn’t my focus, not yet anyway. I had a story to tell — the story of the city’s bankruptcy through the eyes of Detroiters.
With Motor City Muckraker up and running, I hit the streets of Detroit. One evening, I spotted thick, black smoke billowing in the distance.
I followed it, and when I arrived, flames were tearing through the back of a house. Heat shattered the windows, and the roof began to buckle.
Firefighters hadn’t arrived yet, so rushed to the front door, pounding on it, just in case someone was inside. But no one answered.
I was about to call 911 when I heard sirens in the distance. Finally, they were coming.
But as the firefighters rushed to the nearest hydrant, it didn’t work.
They tried another. And another. None of them worked. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.
The flames spread to the house next door, where a mother huddled with her children and screamed at firefighters, “Why aren’t you doing anything? Put out the damn fire”
By the time firefighters found a working hydrant several blocks away, the fire had consumed not just the first house, but the neighbor’s house as well. A third home caught fire, and before long, a fourth.
When it was over, a fire chief told me this wasn’t unusual. It happened all the time.
Hydrants didn’t work. Trucks broke down on their way to fires. They were doing everything they could, he said, but they were losing the battle.
And people were dying.
That fire was just one of many in Detroit. The city had the highest arson rate in the country. The city was bankrupt, and firefighters were being laid off. Equipment was failing. And while the city burned, Mayor Dave Bing was making deep cuts to balance the budget.
I became consumed with the fires — the devastation they caused and how outmatched firefighters were. So much was at stake. Entire blocks were burning down and no one was reporting it.
In February 2015, I made a decision:
I was going to cover every fire in Detroit for an entire year — all 3,500, it turned out. No salary. No newsroom. Just me, my beat-up sedan, and a fire scanner that never stopped squawking.
My office was a cramped 200-square-foot living room. My desk? A kitchen table covered in notes, empty pop cans, and coffee stains.
There were, on average, 10 structure fires every day in Detroit — those are houses, apartments, churches, businesses, and abandoned buildings. I drove to as many as I could, documenting the stories that weren’t being told.
When I couldn’t make it, I listened to recordings of the scanner so I didn’t miss anything.
To my surprise, thousands of people were reading each story I wrote, and the readership continued to grow with every burning house.
The city told me only a few dozen hydrants were broken. But I knew better. You couldn’t miss them — they were marked with large yellow discs or wrapped in caution tape — and they were outside schools, churches, day care centers, high-rise buildings. Even the damn fire stations had broken hydrants out front. They were everywhere, symbols of a system in collapse.
Even the one outside my four-story apartment building was inoperable.
When I asked the city for more details about the broken hydrants, they refused to turn over records to me, so I sued the city.
Meanwhile, as I spent more time at fire scenes, I became a familiar face to the firefighters. I befriended Mike Nevin, an old-school, battle-worn man who had seen too many bodies pulled from the flames.
We’d meet in dark bars, talking about the fire crisis, the toll it was taking on him and his brothers. I could see the weight he carried — the sadness behind the stoic mask. He told me firefighters had been begging the city for years to give them proper equipment and to fix the hydrants, but no one would do anything about it. They felt like they were fighting a losing battle.
I saw things I never imagined: whole blocks engulfed in flames, abandoned firehouses burning to the ground, the bodies of children carried from houses on fire.
Without working hydrants, fire could burn for a long time. Sometimes, the heat from the flames was so intense that the vinyl siding on homes across the street melted like wax.
Covering the nonstop fires was exhausting. My hands curled into fists from carpal tunnel, and I barely slept. My mind lived in a relentless cycle of flames and scanner static. But I couldn’t stop. This was bigger than me.
Then in September 2015, a court ordered the city to release the hydrant records to me. When I finally got my hands on them, the truth took my breath away. Thousands of hydrants were broken. Not a few dozen like the city had told me. Thousands.
Because of my fire coverage, people were finally paying attention. National media outlets interviewed me about my series. And if there’s one thing the city doesn’t like, it’s bad press.
A lot of times, as a reporter, you put your life into a story and nothing changes. But this was different. The new mayor, Mike Duggan, fired the fire commissioner and his top staff. The city launched an aggressive program to fix the hydrants. Fire stations reopened. More arson investigators were hired. And when Detroit finally emerged from bankruptcy, more than $20 million was spent on fire engines and equipment.
For the first time in years, firefighters could do their job. The hydrants worked. The trucks worked. They could save lives again.
And then, in February 2020, the fire came for me.
I woke up to sirens outside my apartment building. Firefighters were knocking on my door. When I opened it, orange embers were falling from the ceiling, and the hallway was covered in thick smoke.
Abby and I grabbed what we could and ran. Flames were tearing through the apartment above us, and I could see the orange glow of flames poking through the roof.
But this time, the hydrant worked. The ladder truck worked. Everything worked. And within a few hours, a fire that could have gutted our apartment building a few years ago, was out.
We lost almost everything, but we were alive.
Like so many Detroiters before us, we were forced to rebuild and start over. The community that supported Motor City Muckraker stepped in and donated what we needed to get back on our feet again.
I often think back to that ambulance ride, but not for the reasons I used to. It’s not the panic or the fear I remember anymore. It’s that moment of stillness, where everything was out of my hands, but I was still breathing.
I just needed time to understand what was really worth fighting for — and that’s what the fire series did for me.
It reminded me why I fell in love with journalism in the first place. It renewed my belief that reporting can still make a difference.
Reporting is about listening, understanding, and finding meaning in the chaos, even when everything seems to be on fire.
And sometimes, it’s about realizing that, despite everything you’ve lost, you’re still here — and as long as you’re here, there’s always another story to tell.
