The Evening Tribune
HORNELL — The Hornell Fire Department, with mutual aid from several local departments, battled a late Tuesday night fire at the Salvation Army Thrift Store, located at 60 Center St., Hornell.
Hornell firefighters responded to the blaze shortly before 9 p.m., and remained on the scene into the 10 p.m. hour.
Upon arrival, heavy smoke conditions were noted throughout the building as it poured from cracks in the masonry block walls, but no flames showed from the outside.
Firefighters conducted a 360 degree assessment of the building, and determined that the fire was concentrated in the back corner of the store, nearest the Byrne Dairy trucking facility.
Hydrants at Loder and Erie, Elm and Erie and Center and Elm were tapped for water, and a crowd of onlookers clustered in adjacent parking lots and along sidewalks, watching as personnel worked to put out the blaze.
Firefighters were able to pop open a back door on the Erie Avenue side, which proved to be a critically important move.
“A lot of these stores, if you come in the front and it started in the rear, it gets up over the drop ceiling. Once you open those front doors, it can show up behind you and lots of times guys get trapped like that,” Hornell Fire Chief Dan Smith said.
“This thing is essentially a giant box with no ventilation,” the chief described.
With donated goods filling the back storage area, firefighters were presented with literal obstacles to reach the source of the fire.
“It was very difficult, and they couldn’t see anything. It’s really walking into an unknown situation. It’s a scary thing walking into that, but these guys are like rabid dogs with it,” Smith said.
On the outside, the ladder truck was deployed, and crews went to work trying to vent the roof, to pull smoke upwards, off the firefighters so that they might have better visibility. However, they ran into some problems. Quarter inch steel decking was laid on the roof, forcing firefighters to switch to heavy duty saws.
The metal decking also prevented the fire from showing up on the thermal imager that was deployed on the roof.
