Salvation Army warehouse heavily damaged by fire

Ed Koch, Mary Manning and Will Oremus

Tuesday, Aug. 5, 2003 | 10:50 a.m.

Salvation Army officials this morning looked at the wet, charred remains of the interior of their fire-blackened aluminum warehouse this morning and estimated that the loss of merchandise, equipment and revenue will be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

"This is just a nightmare," Charles Desiderio, director of development and marketing said of Monday's three-alarm fire that swept through the warehouse at 211 Judson Ave. about 8:30 p.m. Monday. The building was full of used furniture, clothing and appliances.

"The Salvation Army is a $15 million annual operation and the merchandise from our thrift stores accounts for nearly $5 million in annual sales -- a third of our budget. I use the word catastrophic and I don't use that term lightly."

The center, the largest Salvation Army facility in the nation, supplies used items to nine branch stores from Las Vegas to Pahrump, organization leaders said. The Salvation Army has operated the warehouse since the 1970s.

The cause of the fire had not been determined this morning. Fire investigators were on the scene as were phone company workers.

About 60 firefighters from North Las Vegas and Las Vegas fought the blaze, and no firefighters or area residents were injured, North Las Vegas Fire Chief Jim Stubler said.

Firefighters had a difficult time battling the blaze because water pressure was inadequate to handle a large fire in the area that serves mostly one-story apartment complexes, Stubler said.

"It's especially complicated because the fire was through the roof when we got here," Stubler said. Firefighters could not go into the building to attack the flames because the roof was unstable and it was too dangerous, he said.

However, there was nothing toxic inside the building, Stubler said. Firefighters aimed hoses from ladders extended into the smoke to quench the flames.

It appeared that the fire ignited around a refurnishing shop where latex paint is applied to furniture, Stubler said Monday night. A once-yellow sign above the burnt-out garage read: "Auction Saturday, 12 noon."

The building had annual fire inspections and the building "passed with flying colors," Desiderio said this morning.

An official damage estimate was not immediately available, but the extent of the damage became clearer as the sun rose over the valley.

"That was a shipment of very high quality oak, mahogany and cherrywood furniture recently donated by Walker Furniture," said J.D. Dawson, director of the organization's thrift store operations, pointing to a soaked, charred pile of wood.

"We lost two (clothing) bailers each valued at $20,000 and about 1,000 vacuum cleaners."

Three forklifts, each costing the agency $30,000 were either heavily water damaged or destroyed by fire, Desiderio said. They didn't know the exact extent of the damage because those large pieces of equipment had not yet been located in the rubble.

Two rolling metal doors, each valued at $6,000 had huge holes that were made by firefighters to attack the flames that glowed orange through the structure and sent heavy black smoke billowing east across Lake Mead Boulevard.

The Salvation Army's acting county coordinator Gary Zielinski, who also is the finance director, said the warehouse was insured, but until the insurance adjuster views the scene, the full extent of the loss won't be known.

"About one-third of the building was destroyed," he said. "All of the contents were destroyed either by fire, water or smoke. We don't know if the fire got to the wooden trusses in the ceiling. Hopefully we can repair most of this rather than have to rebuild it."

Dawson sent the Salvation Army's 10 trucks out this morning to deliver goods that had been previously purchased -- goods that were packed into the trucks Monday afternoon, Desiderio said.

"We want people to hold off on the donations of merchandise for at least a week because we have no place to store it," Desiderio said, "We are accepting cash donations only at this time. Maybe someone will loan us a large empty building."

However, because well-meaning people will donate directly to the Salvation Army thrift stores, Dawson said extra workers will be at those sites today to put price tags on items as they come in and put them out for sale.

The 25 warehouse workers were given the day off with pay, Zielinski said. About 40 residents in the organization's drug treatment program receive vocational training at the warehouse. They were told to stay in their apartments today. Eventually they will all be part of a clean-up crew at the warehouse.

The sales from thrift stores fund the drug treatment program. Desiderio said that it costs $35,000 to treat each drug addict. The 140 clients who enter the program each year pay nothing for the long-term and short-term treatment.

Without the merchandise to stock the stores, which rotate stocks almost entirely each month, the stores will not be able to make the money necessary to fund programs like drug treatment, Desiderio said.

The estimated loss of thrift store revenues for six days is $180,000, Desiderio said.

Ironically, stacks of mostly unusable mattresses in the parking lot along with piles of broken toys, pieces of furniture and dumpsters full of bike parts and other unusable donated items were a distance from the licking flames and were not harmed.

Smoking is not permitted in the warehouse, Desiderio said.

Neighbors Steven and Holly Moore with their toddler Jeff stood in the front yard of their apartment on Yale Street watching firefighters extinguish the flames. Across the street a one-story white building used by the Salvation Army for services was empty.

Moore said he was driving home from the movie store when he became disoriented from the smoke billowing across the road.

"All I see is smoke, and I'm like, 'I think this is my street,"' he said. "I do a lot of my shopping there. They've got some real good stuff."

Holly Moore said she did not think the flames could reach their home across the street, but she was still worried.

"I don't know where I would have went," she said. "The church evacuated, and they were all getting in their cars running away."

Neil Timpson, a Salvation Army supervisor, said that no one was in the warehouse at the time of the fire.

About 30 to 40 people, some of them in work programs funded by the Salvation Army, come to the center every day to their jobs, office manager Kimberly Hunter said, standing among couches, tables and mattresses stacked in the parking lot.

Hunter said she was the last one to leave the building Monday about 5:40 p.m.

Some of the Salvation Army residents were temporarily evacuated from their next-door dormitory during the fire. The lobby was still smoky when they returned, but that didn't stop them from crowding around the television to watch a TV report on the fire.

Zielinski said most of the organization's social services would be unaffected, except for "families who come in for furniture and supplies after a house fire."

Neighbor Kristie Martin, 20, said she thought at first that the fire must have been a controlled exercise.

"I thought they were burning something on purpose," she said. "Then I saw the fire engines."

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