"where there's smoke, there's fire," Right?

Firefighters responding to reports of a lot of smoke coming from a northeast Atlanta night club early Wednesday found that the old saying, “where there's smoke, there's fire,” isn't always true.

When fire crews forced entry into Kamal's 21, an adult entertainment club on Piedmont Avenue, after 5 a.m., they first noticed that the heavy smoke inside wasn't as choking as normal, Atlanta fire Battalion Chief David Rhodes told the AJC.

Then, they found the source of the smoke — a theatrical smoke machine that had been inadvertently left on when the club closed Tuesday night.

“They knew that the smoke wasn't very choking to them, and as soon as the guy got in about 10 feet, he turned around and came back out and told me, ‘hey, this is a smoke machine; we've just got to find it,'” Rhodes said. “But you couldn't see in the building until we blew it out with a fan.”

Rhodes said that once his crews cleared the smoke, they found the source, a “pretty high-volume” smoke machine near the club's stage.