Fire destroys warehouse at Roche

Dublin Fire officials are looking into the possibility that lightning might have been the cause of a commercial fire that destroyed a warehouse building belonging to Roche Farm & Garden early Wednesday morning.

According to Dublin Fire Chief Matthew Cutler, the National Weather Service confirmed there were several cloud-to-ground lightning strikes in the area of the warehouse that caught on fire between midnight and 1 a.m. Wednesday. Cutler said they were searching for video footage that may have caught what happened. 

“There was a pretty good electrical storm that came through last night,” Cutler said. “(Lightning) is a pretty good possibility.”

No one was injured fighting the fire of the 13,855 square-foot building located at 702 E. Jackson St. Both city of Dublin fire stations, along with some off-duty firefighters and the East Dublin Fire Department, responded to the scene after someone driving on East Jackson Street contacted 911 at 5:24 a.m.  

“It was well involved by the time we got the call,” said Cutler, who  was told that fertilizer and seed were stored inside the warehouse. “The building is a total loss. It was contained to the building the fire was started in. The goal when we have a fire that large is to contain it there. It was a loss for Roche’s, but it could have been a bigger loss if it involved other buildings or equipment that were nearby.”  

It took one hour to get the fire knocked down.

“There was no way, with that amount of fire, for us to try to go inside and make an attack on it,” Cutler said. “When (firefighters) arrived, the roof was starting to fall in. There was nobody inside the building and it wasn’t worth us trying to fight our way in. We just wanted to keep it contained to the building. We were able to do that, so it was a success from that point.”  

Cutler said there were piles of burning and smoldering debris inside the collapsed building later Wednesday morning. Roche’s had a front-end loader digging through that while firefighters moved the burning debris around to put it out.

At that time, North Union Street and parts of East Gaines Street were closed. Cutler said East Jackson Street was shut down earlier in the morning, but was reopened later.

They had already began the investigation, and asked for anyone with information to call the Dublin Fire Department at (478) 277-5032. 

“We’re definitely going to try to get the lightning data and see if there were any strikes anywhere close to this,” Cutler said. “If somebody may have seen something, we’d like to hear from them.”