ORWIGSBURG, Pa. — Fire swallowed a warehouse in West Brunswick Township, near Orwrigsburg.
Daniel Cameron was out early delivering newspapers on Saturday morning when he saw the flames and sent this video to Newswatch 16.
"The first fire truck for the fire pulled in before me; I was following them down the road. And the video shows that there is only one fire truck there. They're not even spraying water yet. So that was the full blaze, no water on it at all. It was terrible," said Daniel Cameron of Orwigsburg.
In the daylight, the building is leveled.
The Deer Lake/West Brunswick Fire Chief says the call came in just before 4:30 in the morning and quickly went to a 2nd alarm.
Roy Heim is the owner of Heim Construction.
He says a plastics company called "Clearly Clean" rents the warehouse from him to house raw materials.
Thanks to a firewall - Heim says his facility, next door, was likely saved from even more damage.
"We were forced by code enforcement to build a 2-hour wall that separated our facility from the storage facility and we lost, we had some loss in our office but not fire. More water damage and smoke," said Roy Heim, the owner of the construction company.
The fire chief says it will be some time before all the rubble is cleared. The construction company owner does tell Newswatch 16 he plans to rebuild.
"At the end of the day, it's a loss of material. Material is not everything. So we'll get through it," Heim said.
"If people were in there working and this happened, It would have been devastating," Cameron said. "So thank god nobody got hurt, and I feel bad for the owners of the building at least they will be able to rebuild and move forward."
A State Police Fire Marshal is investigating.
Schuylkill County EMA has been contacted to figure out how to properly dispose of the material and whether there is an environmental concern for soil and runoff.
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