Owners say Saturday fire caused ‘very little damage’
When Sherod and Emily Waite received a call Saturday afternoon informing them that the fire department was working an apparent blaze at the Woolworth’s building in downtown Bakersfield, the couple were in their car in minutes, driving through a downpour to get to their baby.
The 75-year-old historic structure, that is.
“I was trying to hold back tears,” Waite remembered Monday as she stood on the sidewalk outside the downtown building speaking with a reporter.
“This is like my toddler that I have been raising for the last 2½ years,” she said of the 44,000-square-foot former department store. “My heart was racing.”
They arrived at the building on 19th and K streets at about 3 p.m. and firefighters were already in the building and on the roof. Both county and city units responded, she said.
Firefighters made short work of the flames, which had been confined to the southeast corner of the third floor. A bit of fire and smoke also snaked through a ceiling vent to the roof.
“The craziest part,” said Dan Aguilar, project superintendent with Wallace & Smith, the project’s general contractor, “is that no one knows how it started.”
The fire department arson team was there Saturday, added Waite.
“They had scanning equipment, they had sniffing dogs, there was no sign of forced entry at all.”
No accelerant or other paraphernalia that would suggest arson was found at the scene.
In addition, Aguilar said, all electricity to the third floor is offline.
“All the breakers were shut off,” he said. “No hot work was taking place the day prior in those areas, so it wasn’t like we were cutting metal or grinding metal and an ember found its way into the pile and smoldered for 24 hours.”
And on Saturday, the building was unoccupied,
he said, unless someone was in there who wasn’t supposed to be there.
“Right now we’re baffled as to what started the fire,” Waite said.
Asked if they think the fire will delay the extensive work being done on the interior, and possibly push back plans to open next spring, both Waite and Aguilar said no.
“I don’t think this fire is setting us back at all,” Aguilar said. “We’re showing up today and we’re doing the same work we were planning on doing when we left Friday.”
In fact, several workers were hard at it on the third floor Monday.
Everyone involved is relieved, knowing that it could have been much worse. And they’re grateful, too, for the firefighters who wasted no time in attacking the blaze, and for whomever it was who spotted the fire and called it in.
There was some incorrect information going around that the first floor was involved, Waite said. But that was simply not the case.
The lunch counter on the first floor was never in danger. And the hardware for the luncheonette is currently being stored off site, she said.
The target date for opening, March 2025, remains unchanged, she said.
That’s less than a year away.