Fire in Teele Square

[mjrocks98.livejournal.com]

There is a 3 alarm fire at Rainbow Carpet in Teele Square. Avoid the area tonight, it just came across the scanner that there is a partial roof collapse. Hope the firefighters and anyone who lives in the area are ok. Carpet + Fire + wind = bad night.

Comments

[stargazer.livejournal.com]

Thanks for sharing this. All the sirens have been audible just north of Davis and I was starting to get a little worriedly curious. Hope everything turns out okay in the end.

[alphacygni]

The smoke is incredible thick, and I'm five blocks away. It came on so strongly that I jumped up to make sure it wasn't my house or a neighbor's house on fire. There are tweets from the AlertNewEngland feed about it.

[aredridel.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it's a full on fire. Clarendon Avenue is running with the water from the trucks. Definitely stay away -- people are driving over the fire lines, and there's quite a mess about.

[ilai]

Eek, I was wondering what was up. Just drove home and got turned away at Cameron Ave, where I could smell the smoke in the car. Seems there's another blockade at Weston Ave too.

[svilletheatre.livejournal.com]

I watched a great deal of the fire/response; evidently it started in the rear of Hawk Cleaners, spread over the roof to the nail salon and Kee Kar Lau in a matter of minutes. Cleaners looks like a total loss (roof collapse) nail salon & restaurant too. Maria's Cold Cuts & the SPD substation might only have smoke/water damage. Even at 2:45am they were fighting flames trapped up behind the signage/storefront facades, which appears to be made of some kind of foam-board hanging over the brick exterior.

I am sure they have insurance but that's 3 or 4 local businesses totally fried. As I recall, Kee Kar Lau coincidentally had a massive fire around 1990 or thereabouts.

The carpet place is in a newer/detached portion of the building at the rear so it would seem they might be ok.

Watching the fire dept in this snow/cold really makes you appreciate how difficult of a job they have at times like these.

[squirrelitude]

I suppose it helped that the fire house was *right there*.

[ron_newman]

Thanks for posting this. I was wondering why I was hearing sirens while half-asleep a few hours ago.

Wicked Local report

Universal Hub report and discussion

Patch report with lots of photos

[vibrantabyss.livejournal.com]

Kee Kar Lau is boarded up, as is the police substation. Rudy's hopes to be open this evening, but "call first" since they haven't finished assessing - I think water in the basement mostly for them.

There is little left of the dry cleaners...

[borgin.livejournal.com]

Rudy's now hopes to be open by 5pm tomorrow. I guess they had some smoke and a little water damage, and hopefully it passes inspection and can open for business. (I talked to the owner when I walked past this afternoon.)

[ron_newman]

Maria's Cold Cuts is also boarded up.

Hawk Cleaners is a total loss. I expect what's left of it will be demolished very shortly.

Rainbow Carpet was not in this row of storefronts and I don't think they were damaged at all.

I posted some fire aftermath photos here.

[duffless2323.livejournal.com]

The nail salon also seems to be a total loss. :-(

[closetalker11.livejournal.com]

Here's a quick write-up: http://somerville.patch.com/articles/major-fire-strikes-teele-square-saturday-night

[justme3170.livejournal.com]

This is truly awful as both my husband and I used Hawk Cleaners on a regular basis. In fact, we had just dropped off some shirts/pants/jackets to be cleaned on Wednesday :(