Fire guts south Modesto commercial building

About 30 firefighters battled a two-alarm fire Sunday afternoon that gutted a commercial building in south Modesto, which the property owner estimated caused several hundred thousand dollars in damage.

Modesto firefighters were dispatched about 2:30 p.m. to the blaze in the 300 block of West Hatch Road, about a fifth of a mile west of Crows Landing Road. No one was inside the building when firefighters arrived and there were no injuries, said Modesto Fire Battalion Chief Randy Anderson.

Anderson said the flames were too intense for firefighters to enter the building until they knocked them down. Thick black smoke poured into the sky as the fire burned. Ceres firefighters helped put it out. An investigator was on scene, but Anderson said it probably will be a day or two before the fire’s cause is identified.

Authorities closed West Hatch Road between Crows Landing Road and Cascade Avenue, and that stretch of Hatch was expected to be closed until about 5:30 p.m. Sunday. California Highway Patrol officers detoured motorists.

The commercial building housed three businesses: Falcon’s Auto Repair, a warehouse for the Spa Doctor and the former California Muffler. Building owner Paul Caruso said he had been storing tools and business records at the former muffler shop.

Caruso – who is a former Ceres councilman and Stanislaus County supervisor – said a worker fixing the landscaping sprinklers at his nearby Caruso Shopping Center called him about seeing smoke billowing from his commercial building.

“I’ve been an ambulance driver, a city councilman, a county supervisor,” he said as he watched the firefighters. “I’ve seen it all. You learn to take things in stride. This is going to be a lot (of damage), but you don’t think about it now.”

Caruso could not survey the damage to his roughly 7,200-square-foot metal building but estimated it at several hundred thousand dollars. That does not include the loss of the building’s contents.

This story was originally published June 21, 2015 at 5:31 PM with the headline "Fire guts south Modesto commercial building."