Fire heats up local grocery store

A Clovis firefighter carries a hose out of Lowe’s grocery store as emergency personnel responded to a fire at the store Monday evening. CNJ staff photo: Eric Kluth.

Lowe’s grocery store won’t be opening today and may not reopen for some time due to an after-hours fire late Monday evening.

As store manager Lee Patterson watched firefighters carry axes and fire hoses through his front doors, he said he was glad a quick-thinking employee was working late and called the fire department.

“I’m just glad I still had employees in the store,” Patterson said. “If it had happened an hour later, we wouldn’t have known until the fire department called me and said, ‘We have a ton of roasted marshmallows here, come down and have them with us.’”

Fire Capt. Karen Burns said the department received a call at 10:07 p.m. and responded with three engines and a ladder truck. Once the first people came on the scene and saw smoke billowing out of the store, the department paged out all available personnel.

“We had every one of our units out here, plus ambulances, plus we paged out other shifts,” Burns said.

Burns said the tentative cause was equipment failure and while smoke damage was extensive, fire damage was confined to a storage area.

“Right now what we are looking at is the northeast corner of a back room near the compactor,” Burns said. “It was used today, most of the day and this evening.”

“We can’t say for sure that’s what caused it, but it’s what we’re looking at,” Burns said. “Insurance companies with this size of building will usually send in their own investigators.”

Burns said state regulations require an inspection by the state environment department whenever a restaurant or grocery store with food has a fire, and the store can’t reopen until the food and equipment is determined to be safe.

Patterson said he didn’t expect to have damage estimates until morning. Adjacent businesses including the Sports Outlet reported smoke damage as well, but no fire damage.