Firefighters battling warehouse fire at Rotterdam Industrial Park Cops: No injuries reported
By MIKE GOODWIN and SKIP DICKSTEIN, Staff writers Last updated: 8:13 a.m., Wednesday, August 6, 2008
ROTTERDAM -- A massive fire is consuming part of a warehouse at the Rotterdam Industrial Park and firefighters are pouring water on other buildings to keep the flames from spreading.
A thick of column could be seen rising from the sprawling park on Duanesburg Road.
The fire heavily damaged part of the building and causing a portion of the roof to collapse. Firefighters were trying to contain the flames and could be seen shooting water onto other buildings to contain the flames.
The fire is burning inside a bay at Building 6, a structure the industrial park's owner, the Galesi Group, uses to store paper products, according to the company Chief Operating Officer David Buicko.
"It's contained to the roof, as of right now," he said.
Buicko said fire doors inside the building closed when the fire began, limiting its spread inside the building. Some employees were working inside the building when they reported the fire at about 5 a.m.
"All employees who were working in Building 6 were evacuated," Rotterdam police say in a statement released this morning. "At this time there are no reported injuries. The cause of the fire is under investigation."
I came through about 6:00 - 6:15. They already had trucks from as far as Stanford Heights coming over for aid. The only issue I saw with traffic was all the media (I think newspapers, as I didn't see anything saying they were TV) sitting on the Duanesburg Rd. bridge, just over the crest where anybody coming from Cumby's wouldn't have been able to see them until it was too late. I didn't see the smoke.
I was headed out to Princetown to visit some friends tonight, about 5:30 and their were fire trucks with lights and sirens turning into the park. I wonder if the fire re-kindled?
When the INSANE are running the ASYLUM In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule. -- Friedrich Nietzsche
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ROTTERDAM Fire walls help save facility Cause of blaze at warehouse probed BY JUSTIN MASON Gazette Reporter
Investigators are still trying to determine the cause of a fire that consumed a 22,000-square-foot section of Building 6 at the Rotterdam Corporate Park. More than 100 fi refighters from eight companies around Schenectady County battled the blaze, which broke out at a section of the Distribution Unlimited warehouse shortly before 5 a.m. County Fire Coordinator John Nuzback said there is no official cause for the fire, which was prevented from spreading to other areas of the sprawling complex by the structure’s safety features. “We don’t believe it’s suspicious,” he said late Wednesday afternoon. Nuzback said the fire was fi rst reported when the building’s sprinkler system triggered an automatic alarm. Flames spread quickly through the paper products stored at the warehouse. He said the building’s fire doors and fire walls — features that were built into the structure when it was an army depot — prevented the fl ames from spreading during the initial attack by fi refighters. “The fire walls and fire doors are what contained the fire to that section,” he said. Nuzback said two workers were evacuated from the burning warehouse and roughly 40 employees from other areas of the building. Firefighters were also forced from the warehouse at one point when a large section of its roof collapsed. There were no injuries reported among fi refighters or workers in the building. State and county fire investigators were sifting through the warehouse wreckage during the afternoon but still hadn’t pinpointed a cause. The Galesi Group owns both Distribution Unlimited and the sprawling complex off Duanesburg Road. David Buicko, Galesi’s chief operating officer, credited the efforts of the fi refighters in extinguishing the blaze. “They did a great job,” he said. “The collaborative effort from the various departments that came was terrific,” he said. Distribution Unlimited also operates at the Scotia-Glenville Industrial Park. The company serves major national companies and boasts one of the largest public warehousing and distribution facilities in the Northeast. The blaze in Rotterdam was the third signifi - cant fire call at the park over the past 14 months. The first was touched off in Building 14, when flames ignited inside a machine hopper and then spread into a large collector at the New York Rubber Recycling warehouse in June 2007. More than a half-dozen fire crews were called to the business again in September 2007, when smoke pouring from an overturned bucket loader raised fears of a larger fire in the warehouse. Crews were largely precautionary because the source of the acrid smoke couldn’t be located immediately. Buicko was unsure how much damage was done to Building 6 or the amount of product his company lost during the latest fire. He said the amount of the park damaged by the fire wasn’t extensive, considering the 260,000 square feet contained in Building 6 alone. “I can’t even smell any smoke [in my office],” he said. PETER R. BARBER/GAZETTE PHOTOGRAPHER A fi refighter operates from an aerial platform truck as flames shoot through the roof of Building 6 in the Rotterdam Industrial Park on Wednesday.
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