A consuming fire struck Stratham Tire on Manchester Street in Concord about 6 a.m. Friday, destroying the 1952 building and producing a plume of smoke that could be seen from miles around.
Concord Battalion Chief Bill Weinhold said there were no injuries reported in the 84 Manchester St. blaze, where stacks of tires readily burned and prompted firefighters from 10 departments to respond.
“It was very rapid. Within minutes, the roof was coming down in the building. Within a half an hour, the entire building was fully involved,” he said.
The fire began before the store was open for business. By Friday afternoon, EMS Bureau Chief Aaron McIntire confirmed no one was inside at the time of the blaze.
Weinhold said there were no sprinklers nor a fire alarm system in the old tire shop – valued at $683,000 – and the fire was reported by someone driving by on Route 3.
Wanda Downer, one of the onlookers who drove to the scene to observe, said her foster brother works at the shop and isn’t asked to report in until 7 a.m., well after the time when emergency personnel from across the region began to descend on the building.
After hearing of a three-alarm fire on the police scanner, Downer said she called her brother to say it’d be no use coming in to work and she began to drive the 13 miles from her home in Epsom, where she could already see a column of thick, black smoke.
The cause of the fire wasn’t immediately known. McIntire said the building was large and severely damaged, which will make the investigation challenging.
“It’s going to take them a little while to sift through it,” McIntire said Friday afternoon.
Firefighters responded shortly after 6 a.m. to find thick smoke and fire in the attic, which is used to store tire equipment. Tires “burn very, very, very readily,” the battalion chief said.
The roof quickly began to collapse, prompting firefighters to use ladder equipment and douse the building from outside.
“There’s too much of a risk to do anything interior,” Weinhold said. “We made sure none of our personnel went inside.”
There were some pressurized truck tires in the building that burst, causing loud noises that sounded like explosions, which unsettled some of the observers that gathered on the other side of the road. Several workers from neighboring auto-related businesses stopped by on their way into work.
Angie Schonarth of Concord was finishing her laundry a few hundred feet away at the Manchester St. Laundromat about 6 a.m. when she said she saw the first emergency personnel and signs of the fire.
She and her husband watched as tall flames began to leap from the top of the building and white smoke turned into a thick, black plume, she said.
Within a half hour, she said the back of the building became completely engulfed. Later, when she saw the fire had spread through the front, she said she knew the building was a total loss.
Emergency officials blocked off Manchester Street between Airport Road and Old Turnpike Road during the morning commute, while fire crews from surrounding towns responded to put out the fire. The road was reopened by 10 a.m.
Concord firefighters rang three alarms and called all off-duty personnel to the scene, Weinhold said. Crews came to assist from as far away as Henniker and Goffstown, he said.
(Nick Reid can be reached at 369-3325, nreid@cmonitor.com or on Twitter at @NickBReid.)