Albany Fire Department crews were working a structure fire at Whites Seafood, in the 1000 block of Radium Springs Road, on Tuesday afternoon, with the cause, injuries, and full extent of damage not yet released by officials. The call was first reported by WALB News 10, which said the building is in the city’s southeast district and crews remained on scene at the time of the initial report.

It is the second major business blaze on the same stretch of road in five months. Tomahawk Manufacturing, on the same corridor at the corner of Patrol Drive, burned overnight on January 19, in a fire that left crews still working the site the following morning with cause, injuries, and damage figures unreleased at the time.

What Crews Found at the 1000 Block

Albany Fire dispatchers received the Whites Seafood call early enough in the afternoon for apparatus to arrive while daylight still held over the corridor, per the WALB report. The station’s officers had not, by initial publication, confirmed whether the fire was contained to a single area of the structure, whether it had reached the roof, or whether anyone inside the building or on the lot needed medical attention.

That is a familiar shape for an Albany Fire scene in its first hour. The department’s standard practice is to clear the structure, mount a defensive or offensive attack depending on conditions, and hold off on cause-and-origin commentary until the fire marshal’s office walks the scene. Commercial buildings of the type common on Radium Springs Road, single-story, framed roof, kitchen ventilation hood for the seafood prep area, typically take longer to clear than a comparable residential call.

WALB said it had reached out to officials for more information and would update as crews continued working. No injury count, no dollar figure on losses, and no occupancy status at the time of the fire have been issued.

The 1000 Block and Its Tenants

Radium Springs Road is the local name for a length of Georgia State Route 3 that runs southeast out of downtown Albany toward the Flint River. The 1000 block sits between the river bend and the older residential streets to the north, in a stretch where small family seafood markets, auto repair shops, light manufacturing, and convenience stores share frontage on a two-lane road that carries through traffic to the south side of Dougherty County.

The Whites name has been attached to seafood retail in Albany for years, with related listings showing market and restaurant locations at 312 South Monroe Street, 1616 East Broad Avenue, and the 1009 Radium Springs Road address that sits inside the affected block. The Radium Springs storefront has been listed across consumer review sites under the Whites Family Seafood and Whites Seafood names, with varying status flags that do not reliably reflect day-to-day operations on a corridor where signage outlasts ownership turnover.

What that means for a fire investigator is straightforward. The walk-through has to establish who held the lease, what equipment was on premises, what storage was in the back of the house, and whether the kitchen line was active at the time of ignition. None of those threads has been pulled in public yet.

Two Fires, One Corridor, Five Months

The Tuesday call lands on a corridor that already pulled Albany Fire into a major commercial response this year. The Tomahawk Manufacturing fire on January 19 was reported overnight by WALB after crews had worked the site for hours. The building sits less than a mile from the Whites Seafood address, on the same Radium Springs frontage where the road meets Patrol Drive.

The two incidents share a near-identical early reporting profile: cause unknown, damage unknown, injury count unknown, fire crews still on scene at the time of first publication. The table below summarizes what is on the record so far.

The pattern alone does not point to a single cause. It does point to a corridor where commercial structures, several of them decades old, are aging into the years when wiring, roof framing, and kitchen ventilation systems start to show their wear.

A Stretch With Forty Years of Fire Memory

The Radium Springs name carries weight in Albany because of what stood at the end of the road for most of the twentieth century. The Radium Springs Resort Casino, a white-column landmark opened in 1927 by New York advertising figure Barron G. Collier and local developer Thad Huckabee, drew visitors from across the Southeast for fishing, dancing, and gambling at a natural spring that pulled millions of gallons of cold water out of the limestone every day.

That building, fifty-five years old by then, was gutted by fire in 1982 in the event that locals still treat as the corridor’s pivot. Repeated Flint River floods through the 1990s, including the catastrophic 1994 inundation, finished what the fire started.

The result is a corridor whose institutional memory of large fires sits in living recall for many Albany residents, and a Radium Springs neighborhood whose commercial base has been thinned for four decades. A simple timeline tells the long arc.

1. 1927: Radium Springs Resort Casino opens; the building becomes the corridor’s anchor for the next half century.
2. 1982: The casino is gutted by a major fire, ending its run as a resort.
3. 1994: The Flint River flood inundates the property; subsequent storms cause further damage through the decade.
4. January 19, 2026: Tomahawk Manufacturing on Radium Springs Road at Patrol Drive burns overnight.
5. May 19, 2026: Whites Seafood in the 1000 block draws Albany Fire crews for the second commercial response of the year on the corridor.

Albany Fire’s Long-Pushed Truck Replacement Arrives

The Whites Seafood fire arrives in the same calendar year that Albany Fire Department is taking delivery of new pumper apparatus the city has been chasing for three budget cycles. In February 2023, Chief Cedric Scott, who has led the department since June 2018, asked the Dougherty County commission for SPLOST funding to replace aging trucks that were starting to limit the department’s response options.

The request totaled $3.02 million for three new pumpers, the front-line vehicles that carry water and hoses to the initial attack on a structure fire. Speaking to WALB at the time of the request, Scott described the procurement as a response to a fleet whose service age was beginning to creep up.

The trucks that we’ve had, they’re beginning to get some age on them. The technology on fire trucks continues to improve, and we’ve made strides with that. We’re just so grateful that SPLOST is in place; it allows the county to support equipment like this.

Scott told the broadcaster the new units would feature rollover protection and clean-cab technology, which limits firefighter exposure to the carcinogens that ride home on turnout gear after a working fire. Delivery was scheduled for 2026, the year now hosting the corridor’s second major commercial response.

What’s Next on the Scene

For Whites Seafood, the next official update will likely come from the Albany Fire Department’s public information channel once the scene is cleared and the fire marshal’s office has begun its origin work. Commercial fires of this profile typically take days to weeks to produce a confirmed cause, and longer for an insurance loss figure to land in public.

For the Radium Springs corridor, the Tuesday call adds a second commercial fire to a year that began with one. Albany Fire’s next routine update is the place to watch for confirmation of cause, injuries, and damage at 1009 Radium Springs Road.