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Despite $300,000 damage, Bob Brown Tire Center opens for business as usual next morning
LEE PERLMAN
THE MID-COUNTY MEMO
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| Can’t keep a good man (or tire dealer) down. In spite of fire damage to some service bays, Bob Brown Tire Center on Sandy Boulevard keeps rolling out satisfied customers. Shop foreman, Aaron Christensen puts new tires on a customer’s pickup truck. |
| MEMO PHOTO: TIM CURRAN |
The blaze was caused by a short circuit in a vehicle parked inside the building, Brown told the Memo. “We got an alarm call at 4 p.m. on a Sunday,” he says. “We do get false alarms, occasionally, but then we also got a call from our alarm service that smoke was billowing out of the building.”
The Portland Fire Bureau responded within minutes after being notified, but not quickly enough to prevent major smoke and heat damage. The fire, which reportedly reached a temperature of 900 degrees, “melted a computer alignment machine seven bays away,” Brown says. All told, the damage amounted to in excess of $300,000. “We’ve been in business 27 years and have never had anything close to this occur,” he says.
Nonetheless, he concedes, “It could have been a lot worse. Nobody was hurt. None of our inventory was damaged. The alarm system, firewalls, and firedoors worked as intended. The fire department was there within minutes. We hired Cooper Construction, a fire smoke and water damage firm, for the repair work - I called them at 7:30 a.m. on Monday, and they were there by 8 a.m., and had workmen on the job by 9 a.m. We have excellent insurance coverage. We were up and running later that morning.
“We have four bays in operation out of a total of eight, and we should be back to one hundred percent by mid-September,” Brown says. “No one has been laid off.”
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