A car igniting inside an auto shop on 7th Street created a complicated firefight after the flames spread to other vehicles and injured one worker.
Harrisburg Fire Chief Brian Enterline said calls started coming into Harrisburg’s Station 1 around 4:55 p.m. alerting them to fire coming through the roof of 2327 N. 7th St., which was blocks away.
When crews arrived, Enterline said the building, which was part auto garage and part office space, was fully involved with the fire seen rising through the roof.
Enterline said crews immediately had to take a defensive stance, due to part of the roof already collapsing.
“It’s been a nasty stubborn fire to fight,” Enterline said. He explained that it’s an old building that was cut into different spaces with partition walls that have hampered crews’ efforts.
In addition to that, the building is a single story at the front but two stories in the back where there is a basement garage, according to Enterline.
There are eight to 10 cars in the basement, with tires, fuel and everything else involved in an auto repair shop still burning hours later and his crews unable to get to them, he said.
Enterline said with the portion of the building that has collapsed, the only other entrance is a sloped driveway that is currently filled with 6 feet of water run-off from the firefight.
The floor/ceiling between the first floor and basement is concrete, so crews can’t try to break through it to get water directly on the fire, he said.
“One car fire is bad inside a building. We got about 8 of them still burning, smoldering inside there,” Enterline said. “We just can’t get control of it.”
The start of the fire was witnessed by employees inside the garage portion of the shop, Enterline said, but there is a language barrier preventing them from having full details tonight.
One car did catch fire, but Enterline said they are not sure what caused that fire to start. One employee did suffer minor burn injuries but no other injuries were reported as of 8 p.m.
Everyone has been cooperating, Enterline said, so he expects to have the full cause of the fire within the coming days.
The next concern is the likely toxic runoff, which Enterline called an “environmental nightmare.”
The building is a total loss, he said, and DEP and Dauphin County Hazmat are on scene to address the runoff.
Enterline estimated they have already put 100,000 to 200,000 gallons of water on the fire, and that’s with them being “cautious and cognizant” of the type of runoff that would be created the second they started the firefight.
“We let the roof burn off a bit once it burned through because once we put water on it, we created an environmental issue,” Enterline said. They still wouldn’t have been able to get through to the fire because the roof was intact, so they just let it burn which helped them get the top floor extinguished.
There are some “booms,” or physical barriers, being used to redirect some of the water run-off coming from the proper. Railroad tracks are directly behind the building and on the other side of the tracks is a section of Paxton Creek.
Enterline said he kept the firefight at a first alarm, which brought all of the city crews to this fire, plus some mutual aid units. He also called in some off-duty firefighters to help relieve crews that have been on scene for hours already. Other mutual aid crews are staffing the city firehouses while they work on the fire.
“It’s just been labor-intensive, long-drawn-out firefight trying to get to the nooks and crannies of it,” Enterline said.
Crews are expecting to remain at the fire location for hours yet Tuesday night, although Enterline said the fire is contained.
“This basement could wreak havoc on us all night,” Enterline said. The front of the building could have some hot spots as well that they will monitor throughout the evening.
“It’s been a heck of a night,” Enterline said.
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