On Aug. 19, 2021, a fire started in the service department at Country Club Chrysler Dodge Jeep Ram at approximately 10:30 p.m. WVADA recently spoke with Jack Stewart, the owner and president, about the fire. Jack’s dealership is still recovering, and full recovery probably won’t happen until August 2022. He spoke about lessons learned from the fire and recommendations for other dealers. T he fire started in a Ram 2500 diesel pickup truck with two disconnected batteries. It was up on a lift because service mechanics had been working on it. They had disconnected the batteries because that was the proper procedure for their work on the truck. A passerby saw smoke coming out of the building and dialed 911. Several fire departments responded. “They were probably there by 10:45 p.m., and they stayed until about 3 a.m.,” Jack said. “It didn’t take them long to put out the fire, but they had a lot of checking to do because of the heat to make sure it hadn’t spread anywhere else. I live 75 miles away, and when I got to the dealership, I thought we were fine. The fire departments had done a good job and contained the fire just to the area where the fire was. The next day, the fire marshall and the insurance adjuster came to see the damage in the daylight, and we saw that smoke had destroyed the whole interior of the building. There was even smoke on the paperwork in the safe. We ended up replacing everything except the outside walls. We even replaced the metal roof and the insulation against it.” The True Cost of a Fire At a Dealership: Lessons Learned and Important Insights from Jack Stewart Approximately 20 investigators spent a whole day looking for clues about what happened, but the investigation’s results were inconclusive. “The truck belonged to a contractor, and he had some power tools in the cab. It’s possible lithium batteries might have powered them. If so, the batteries might have been responsible, but the experts could not determine the fire’s origin because it was so hot that it melted everything in the truck’s cab,” said Jack. Jack had adequate insurance coverage, but he doesn’t know how he could have been better prepared than he was. He said, “Maybe the economy could cause a problem, but I don’t know what physical disasters besides fire could affect us. We were careful, so I didn’t think a fire was likely. We aren’t in a flood zone either, other than from a tornado. There are no wildfires or earthquakes in West Virginia, and forest fires here don’t burn buildings.” When the fire did happen, the dealership’s building was vulnerable. “The original building was probably built in the 1960s, and it is almost the size of a football field,” said Jack. “It didn’t have a sprinkler system or firewalls because those weren’t required when it was built. It still doesn’t have a sprinkler system because the state doesn’t require them unless you have 300 people in the building at the same time, and installing one would be too expensive. However, we’ve put up firewalls between different sections. We’ve also installed fireproof doors. Maybe it won’t be as serious if it happens again. But how do you protect against smoke getting in the safe?” Photo Credit: WBOY 12 News wvcar.com 10 WVADA
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