Fire marshals have deemed the CMG Auto Repairs building at 211 Springs-Fireplace Road in East Hampton unsafe for occupation following a fire there a week ago.
The East Hampton Fire Department was dispatched to the shop at 9:54 a.m. on Sept. 17 in response to a report of a car on fire. By the time firefighters arrived, “The whole shop was pretty much on fire,” Chief Duane Forrester said in a phone call later that day.
They were able to “knock it down pretty fast,” he said, and limit the damage to one area of the building. However, said the chief, the force of the water used to extinguish the blaze may have caused structural damage to the walls.
The building’s “truss roof” — a factory-built triangular framework of light timbers — was another concern, as the style is prone to collapse when exposed to high heat (presenting an additional hazard to firefighters).
The Amagansett Fire Department sent an engine to assist, and the Sag Harbor Fire Department was called in as a Rapid Intervention Team, standing by in case any firefighters needed rescue. East Hampton Town police, who were there as well, spoke with the shop mechanic, who said the 2014 Chevrolet Equinox he’d been working on had caught fire while on the car lift.
The fire was extinguished without incident with no injuries reported, and the scene was cleared at 12:11 p.m. and turned over to town fire marshals for an investigation.
“The fire occurred while hot work was being conducted on a motor vehicle positioned on a car lift inside a repair bay,” Chief Fire Marshal David B. Browne confirmed by email on Tuesday. The vehicle became “fully engulfed in flames,” which spread to the structure, but “code-compliant fire partitions” prevented the blaze from spreading throughout the building, into spaces occupied by other tenants.
Those partitions, paired with the quick response times of the E.H.F.D. and the mutual-aid departments, “protected against further loss,” Mr. Browne wrote, but the building’s truss roof was “severely damaged, which compromises the integrity of the entire building.”
Fire marshals placarded the building as an unsafe structure, prohibiting occupation until further notice. An engineer’s report will determine whether it can be repaired or must be condemned.