Owner, staff flee building blaze
Groomers and owner get out safely with four bulldogs and a Maltese
SAN JOSE >> Mario Rodriguez was in a storage unit behind his doggrooming salon in San Jose and his three English bulldogs were barking like they were scared, so he walked outside and saw fire and black smoke billowing from the building next door, a structure inches from his salon and full of “mountains of random stuff,” he said.
“The whole building just immediately ignited,” said Rodriguez, 25. “The whole building was just a lot of things just piled together over the years. You don't know what's going to happen, if something next door is going to explode.”
He bolted into his salon, he said. “There were two groomers, with one dog each,” said Rodriguez, who opened the salon, Unity Bulldogs Pet Grooming, in October.
Rodriguez told the groomers there was a fire and to get their dogs — a French bulldog and a Maltese — and meet him outside, he said. “They got them off the table, on the leash and they were outside the door within seconds,” Rodriguez said.
Fire trucks were starting to stream in with sirens wailing and police were pulling into the area. Rodriguez ran back to get his own dogs from the storage unit, putting Drago and Queen on a double leash and grabbing Paris, “my smallest one,” in one arm.
The woman with the wig shop next door took the bulldogs for him
while Rodriguez called a family member to come get them. The groomers fled down the street with Frenchie and the Maltese, calling the dogs' owners as they hurried away from the fire, to tell them their pets were safe, and to arrange for pickup, Rodriguez said.
“By the time we got in touch with the pet parents, the roads were closed,” he said. The groomers took the dogs a few streets away and each “delivered their doggy back to the owner,” he said.
San Jose fire officials said July 20, the twoalarm fire on the 900 block of Park Avenue, in the Sunol-midtown neighborhood about a mile southwest of downtown, was called in just after 3 p.m. and brought under control just after
6 p.m. by five dozen firefighters who confined it to the one-story corner building where it started. The structure, described by fire officials as a “vacant commercial building that had unknown stored items,” suffered severe damage, including a collapsed roof. The site would be monitored throughout the night to douse hot spots and prevent rekindling, said San Jose Fire Department Capt. Luis Alanis.
No injuries were reported.
Rodriguez, of San Jose, said the building that burned, whose wall ran inches from the wall of the smaller two-story blue building where he rents salon space, was filled with clothes, toys and furniture. “It was a big mess,” he said, “all flammable stuff.”
Earlier on the day of the fire, he said, he noticed what appeared to be signs that someone had broken in: an unsecured entrance and fresh graffiti. “There was no maintenance to that building,” he said. “It had gotten broken into before.”
The cause of the fire — which sent smoke billowing across the city to the southeast — is under investigation, Alanis said.
Rodriguez's insurer has told him his salon is a total loss from smoke and water damage. Now, after less than a year of opening a brick-and-mortar dog grooming business, after operating first on a mobile basis and then from a garage, Rodriguez must look for a new space so he can keep his groomers employed and the area's bulldogs — and other breeds — groomed.