Alabama ? Five small Baptist churches were burned to the ground or otherwise damaged in a string of fires that investigators said were apparently set one after another by arsonists making their way down the highway.

The fires broke out late Thursday or early Friday in Bibb County, about 25 miles south of Birmingham. Chief Deputy Sheriff Kenneth Weems said the blazes were set “as fast as they could drive from one location to the next.”

In 1996, race was a factor in a series of arsons that damaged rural black churches in Alabama and elsewhere. But this week’s fires were set at four white churches and one with a black congregation.