Fire guts industrial building in East Central Spokane

Firefighters spent hours Wednesday night extinguishing one of the largest Spokane structure fires in years, successfully keeping the blaze from spreading to multiple large fuel tanks and a gas station just a few feet away.

Spokane Fire responded to 101 N. Madelia Street around 8:20 p.m. to find “heavy, dark smoke pouring from every window and door of the two-story commercial structure,” according to a news release from the department.

The building, believed to be vacant, belongs to Tormino’s Sash & Glass, according to property records.

The fire, which escalated to a three-alarm response, had already advanced to the point where firefighters deemed an offensive attack wouldn’t help.

“We knew we weren’t going to be able to save that building,” said Spokane Fire spokesman Justin De Ruyter.

More than 70 firefighters, 10 fire trucks and five ladder trucks were on the scene.

The crews quickly pivoted to a defensive approach to keep the fire from spreading to neighboring structures, including large fuel tanks on the Banner Furnace and Fuel property abutting the building. Catty-corner from the fire lies a Pacific Pride commercial gas station.

De Ruyter said the heat from the fire was warming the large fuel tanks around 100 feet to the north of the building, and embers were falling on neighboring buildings and properties, including the gas station.

“I was really surprised we didn’t get spot fires off of that,” De Ruyter said.

To avoid catastrophe, firefighters kept a steady stream of water on the tanks to keep the heat from blowing them, and teams patrolled the nearby streets to keep an eye out for fires sparked by the embers.

Adding to the challenge was the “impending structural collapse with bulging walls and roof failure, and numerous surrounding powerlines,” the release states. At one point in the night, a tree on the Riverside Avenue side of the building fell into the power lines.

The structural collapse came to a head as well; the roof buckled in its entirety and took a portion of the south wall with it. Spokane Fire said the warehouse is a “total loss.” The lack of structural integrity will make it hard to determine what sparked the large blaze.

No one was hurt in the roughly 12-hour ordeal, which included responses from partner agencies, including the Spokane Valley Fire Department, Spokane County Fire District 8 and Spokane County Fire District 9 to assist in the firefighting efforts and to cover the city department on other calls.

Crews remained at the scene Thursday to extinguish spot fires, using a ladder and hose three stories high to douse the inside of the building from above. Dark, ash-laden water poured out of the structure onto surrounding streets and into area storm drains as the smell of smoke hung in the air.

The blaze spat smoke, ash and materials from the building across the East Central neighborhood. Large chunks of materials could be spotted littering the sidewalks and roadways in the area. De Ruyter said the agency has notified the Department of Ecology about the blaze and potential contamination.

East Central resident Asia Brown said she spotted the smoke from the courtyard of her apartment building on Sprague Avenue around 8:30 p.m. At first, it appeared like a solid column rising straight upward, before the wind began spreading it across the city. She said that within a few hours, it was hard to make out streetlights in the distance through the haze.

“It was really, really thick,” Brown said. “Breathing that in can’t have been good.”

Brown watched the firefighting response well into the early morning hours alongside many of her neighbors, and several individuals who she said appeared to travel to the neighborhood just to watch.

De Ruyter said most of the spectators were respectful and stayed out of the firefighters’ way, but being near a structure fire comes with inherent risks. The water runoff and smoke can contain a number of harmful chemicals and pollutants. He advised would-be lookie-loos to keep that in mind.

Brown was impressed by the firefighters ability to manage the large crowd and to contain the blaze to the one building, she said.

“It just went on for hours,” Brown said. “They did a really good job keeping where it was, containing it and making sure it didn’t spread.”

Brown said the area is a nice neighborhood that seems to become a more attractive place to live day by day. She has noticed more homeless people in the area as of late, including large encampments around the warehouse that burned. She believes someone who may have been seeking shelter in the building could have started the blaze.

That suspicion of the fire’s origin is shared by Jim Hanley, owner of the Tin Roof furniture store. As Spokane officials have “cracked down on the downtown area,” he said he’s noticed an eastern migration into the area of his business and Wednesday’s fire. He and other neighboring businesses have had to report a number of large encampments, some of which included heating or cooking fires, in recent months.

“It’s been terrible,” Hanley said. “They get cleaned out and they come right back.”

Hanley said he believes the responses from Spokane Police have been timely, but their efforts to assist the homeless individuals in the area lack any real teeth. In his opinion, the city’s officials should be doing more to explore avenues to compulsory drug treatment or service program attendance for homeless individuals in need. Doing so could stave off incidents like the fire, he said.

Hanley drove down from his home to watch the blaze after his wife “saw the flames from her sewing room.” The flames were at least 50 feet above the roof by the time he arrived Wednesday night, and ash and sparks could be seen drifting down across the neighborhood.

With his business just a block away, Hanley was concerned about losing his building to one of those sparks. He also worried about damage to the furniture inside.

“Our real concern was with the smoke that was rolling out of this place,” Hanley said, gesturing to the warehouse shell. “Being a furniture store, we have a lot of fabric that absorbs all the smell.”

Hanley said he was relieved to learn in his walk around Thursday morning that the fabric and furniture were unharmed. By the time he went home around 11 p.m., the roof and wall of the burning building had fallen, the blaze was under control, and a blanket of smoke was “laying real low” over the neighborhood.

Wednesday’s fire was the third to tear through a Tormino’s Sash and Glass facility since 2017. Started by lifelong Spokane resident John Tormino Sr. in 1950, the bargain-priced window and door company operated out of a storefront on the corner of Riverside and Helena, directly next to the warehouse that burned, until a fire destroyed the interior.

The Tormino family would lose the storefront in its entirety in a second structure fire at the location two years later. A month before it was scheduled to be demolished, a fire tore through the abandoned building, leaving only a few walls and a mangled heap of twisted metal and scorched wood.

A Spokane Fire spokesman said transient individuals were known to have been staying in the building the week the second blaze broke out, as reported by The Spokesman-Review. John Tormino Jr. added that he was repairing the fence around the abandoned storefront “at least once a week” in the months leading up to the fire.

Tormino Sr., who died in 2017 at the age of 90, told The Spokesman-Review in a 2012 interview that he started the business with a $200 loan and a wood-frame storm door he built on the sidewalk outside his shop. Its proceeds led to more doors, more windows and eventually a full-fledged business.

By 1952, he’d moved his start-up into the building at 102 N. Helena St., where he hung a sign that served as a beacon for hard-to-find windows and doors. The business would continue to grow in the decades to come, spanning several properties and buildings across East Central.

The warehouse scorched Wednesday, located behind the storefront where that sign stood for 65 years, was the last remaining tie to the original location. Tormino’s now operates out of a storefront at 827 E. Francis Ave in North Spokane.