A massive blaze in a Langley warehouse took more than 80 firefighters several hours to put out Friday night, but the lumber company that owns the building expects to “up and running” again next week.
Ken Humphrey drove to the site as soon as he heard it was on fire. The operations manager for Country Lumber said after the shock of seeing the massive flames wore off, he and his colleagues immediately began planning the steps they’d need to take to get back to work.
“It was fully engulfed, so there was really not much we could do except look at it,” Humphrey said. “Right then, we’re thinking of: ‘what do we do Monday?’”
“That’s basically all we can do is just get past it and move on,” he said.
The company has 25 employees who work at the site. It’s bringing in portable offices for them to work from this coming week.
Because the building is a secondary location, and because it’s covered by insurance, Humphrey said the company is in good shape to continue working there.
“This just happened to be our storage warehouse for our forklifts and some of our backup material, so the bulk of our material was not hampered in any way,” he said.
Things could have been much worse.
The warehouse was constructed before building codes required sprinkler systems, and it’s located in a part of Langley that doesn’t have any fire hydrants.
Langley Township Assistant Fire Chief Pat Walker said the blaze “had a good hold on the building” by the time firefighters arrived on the scene. Crews worked primarily to contain the fire and prevent it from spreading to other businesses in the area, he said.
“We went into a defensive mode right away,” Walker said.
There were also highly flammable materials inside the building, including propane-powered forklifts, which exploded during the blaze.
Walker said crews are still investigating the cause of the blaze, but that they believe it began in a shop near the rear of the building where the forklifts were housed.
No one was injured in the fire, but Walker estimated that there had been more than $1 million in damage.