By Herald Staff
An explosion caused by a fire that began in Seasons Rotisserie & Grill destroyed the local eatery and two neighboring businesses Friday afternoon. At least seven firefighters were injured.
Dave Abercrombie, spokesman for the Durango and Fire Rescue Authority, said the fire was reported at 1:39 p.m. after smoke and flames were seen coming from the roof of Seasons Restaurant. At approximately 2:30 p.m. the fronts of Seasons, 764 Main Ave.; Le Rendezvous, 750 Main Ave.; and Half-Price Tees, 758 Main Ave. exploded in a fireball, showering the street with flying glass, bricks and other debris.
“It looked like the whole roof of Le Rendezvous rose up,” said Tom Barnes, who witnessed the explosion from a roof on East Second Avenue. “The lead guy at the hose went pinwheeling. He disappeared into the smoke and we couldn’t see him.”
Three firefighters were blown from the roof by the explosion, according to DFRA spokesman Dave Imming.
Seven firefighters were taken to the hospital, said David Bruzzese, spokesman for Mercy Regional Medical Center. Six were listed in good condition and one in fair condition. At least three of the firefighters were admitted. As of 5:45 p.m. two firefighters had been treated and released.
Cell phone service in the area was temporarily disrupted, as were traffic lights. Several hundred people were on the 700 block watching the fire at the time of the explosion, but the area was cleared immediately afterward. Main Avenue was closed from Seventh Street north to Ninth Street and from Second Avenue west to Narrow Gauge Avenue.
All off-duty fire personnel were called in almost immediately after the first report. Durango Fire and Rescue Authority was the initial response agency, and the Upper Pine Fire Protection District, Los Pinos and Fort Lewis Mesa fire departments also responded.
Paige Marchus, a server at Seasons, said she was told by a cook in the kitchen that the hood exhaust fan had stopped working, apparently starting the fire in a vent above the kitchen. It spread quickly to the adjacent businesses. All businesses in the 700 block were evacuated.
Sherry Exum, of Durango, was eating lunch at Seasons when the fire broke out. Patrons saw a downdraft of smoke at the top of a window outside. No one thought much of it, she said, but then someone report there was a fire in the building. About 20 people were inside Seasons at the time.
“There were a lot of people questioning: ‘Do I pay or what do I do?’” she said. “We didn’t know the extent of it.”
Exum left the restaurant and saw only a small column of smoke. “You would be surprised at what it looked like when it started. It was nothing.”
Abercrombie said it may be a day or more before investigators release the official cause of the fire.
A ladder truck in front of Seasons apparently took the brunt of the blast. Abercrombie said.
Karen Barger, owner of Seasons Rotisserie & Grill, watched from the alley west of Main Avenue as her business was destroyed. She expressed relief that her employees and diners were OK.
“Everybody got out,” she said. Eight to 10 employees and about a dozen diners were in the restaurant when it was evacuated, Barger said.
Barger lamented that the restaurant’s wine collection was destroyed. “We had a rather large wine inventory with some things I cannot replace,” she said.
A bystander took away wine-stained corks as a memento. “When they rebuild, they can have these,” said Bonnie Doolittle .
Nearby business owners carted out papers and other valuables in case the fire spread.
Curious onlookers were kept back from the scene of the fire, many with camera phones aimed at the blaze. One viewer, Tom Abbott, a real estate agent in Bar Harbor, Maine, watched online through Brainstorm Internet’s “Eye on Durango” Web cam in Durango. “The first thing I saw was smoke coming out of the roof of one building,” Abbott said from Maine. “There were no fire trucks there. But after they arrived, it seemed that the fire began to spread.”
Brainstorm’s Web cam crashed almost immediately because of heavy online traffic, said Brainstorm owner Phil Bryson. “We had almost a couple thousand hits almost immediately, especially when the television stations started carrying the feed,” he said. The site was back up at 4:44 p.m.
Heavy online traffic also clogged the Herald’s Web site, which crashed about 5:40 p.m.
Charity Love and Brian Williams were eating at Seasons when someone told them the building was on fire and they had to leave. They returned later to retrieve two Jack Russell terriers from their Chevrolet Tahoe that was parked across the street from Seasons.
Some side streets in the area were closed to traffic.
Several other major fires have devastated Main Avenue businesses. A look at the major ones: August 24, 1974: An early-morning fire caused by arson in the 800 block of Main destroyed nine businesses and several apartments. Firefighter Nick Parks III and Durango Police Cpl. Gale Emerson were killed when a brick wall exploded.
Sept. 23, 1982 – The Turn of the Century Mall at 640 Main was gutted and at least one fireman suffered second-degree burns. Firefighters evacuated people waving frantically from a balcony.
July 29, 2006 – The Central Hotel at 975 Main burned in the early afternoon, started by an arsonist. Twenty-three tenants lost their homes, although no one was seriously hurt.
