LOYAL. LOCAL. COMPLETE.
MARSHALL – A hot day in Marshall got even hotter for first responders on Friday as a local business caught fire.
On Friday, Sept. 4, at roughly 10:11 a.m., Marshall Fire Protection District received a page from dispatch reporting a structure fire at 806 North 2nd Street in Marshall, the location of Doric Products Inc.
A bystander, Gary Wallace, who lives near the location of the fire, said he thought he smelled smoke. Wallace went inside his home to make sure it wasn’t coming from the inside of his residence.
“Nothing inside, so I came back out. Within five minutes, there was smoke, and less than five minutes later, fire came out of the north end of the building,” Wallace said.
Marshall Fire Protection District Chief Jeffery Parsley said there was one employee in the building when the fire started, and that employee was not injured.
“I was here within a minute (of the dispatch call),” Parsley said. “There was fire coming out of both ends.”
Parsley explained that the fire started in a nearby warehouse and spread to the office building, which had a conjoined door to the warehouse.
He said the attached warehouse and office building are total losses, but he commended his team for preventing the spread to other nearby structures.
“I'm very pleased that we kept it in that building, that we didn't lose the other building. It didn’t touch either of the (other) warehouses; one directly behind it that’s only about 12 feet away and then the other one across the alley,” Parsley said.
He added that he spoke with the employee who was in the building at the time of the fire.
“What we're thinking is it's electrical in nature because they had a plug-in that kept getting hot, and they had made arrangements for somebody to come look at it, and that's where the fire was coming up that wall where that electrical plug-in is. So, I'm thinking it's going to be electrical,” Parsley explained.
He clarified that it is still up to the fire marshal to make the final determination of its cause.
A portion of the road was closed during the response so emergency vehicles could easily access the structure.
The Marshall Fire Protection District received assistance from the Ambulance Service of Clark County and the City of Martinsville Fire Department.