Staff photo / Dan Pompili The Extra Space Storage facility behind The Salvation Army on U.S. Route 224 is partially accessible to those whose units were not affected by Saturday’s fire. The area around 40 units that were burned remains off limits while the State Fire Marshal and Extra Space’s insurance representatives continue to investigate the cause of the fire and evaluate the damage and safety around the building.

BOARDMAN — Some storage unit renters already have answers about their property, others will receive them soon after a fire. For many, the answers are not good.

“The harsh reality is that, in that restricted area, they are not going to be able to recover anything. Everything was burned. It’s just pieces of things,” Boardman Fire Chief Mark Pitzer said.

The fire that happened on Saturday damaged roughly 40 units at the Extra Space Storage facility on state Route 224. The company has two units there, one directly next to Giant Eagle and another adjacent facility behind The Salvation Army. The one behind The Salvation Army is where Pitzer’s squad responded shortly before 1 p.m., with assistance from Canfield, Austintown, Youngstown, Ellsworth, Springfield and Green Township fire departments. The blaze took more than three hours to subdue.

McKall Morris, communications director for the Salt Lake City, Utah-based company, said the facility has 702 units, and the building affected by the fire has 220, of which 208 were occupied.

“Customers in nonimpacted buildings, where they can still access the property, were emailed that their access was restored on Monday,” Morris said. “Then, on Tuesday and Wednesday messages to customers in buildings nearby the fire, where access was still restricted, were updated.”

Morris said that includes H, I, and J building units. She said the company will continue to use email to communicate with clients as more information becomes available.

Morris said the company is aware that some customers have been frustrated by a lack of information and the fact that calls to the facility are being rerouted to other Boardman offices.

She said phones there are not tended because the company is keeping employees out of the facility.

“We haven’t been able to have our team on-site and accessing information,” she said. “It’s a little too early to have staff on the scene safely, so we don’t have a lot of information to share right now.”

Morris said the restricted area will remain off limits at least until the State Fire Marshal’s (Ohio Department of Commerce) office and Extra Space’s insurance representatives can meet and assess the situation. Pitzer said the meeting is scheduled for today, but she said it is only the first step, and the process of making the building safe could take weeks or longer.

“They’ll go forward from that point. It’s a longer process than I think most people want it to be, and we would ask for patience as we go through it the safest way we can,” she said. “We will be restricting access until we are 100% sure it’s totally safe.”

Morris said that those who have renter’s insurance for their units should begin the claim process now and she urged those with unaffected units to consider purchasing the insurance if they do not have it.

A CHALLENGING FIRE

Pitzer said the fire demanded much more of his staff than the average call.

Most standard house fires usually require 15 to 16 firefighters on scene, and an average fire at a commercial building will call for as many as two dozen. At most calls, firefighters will use one or two bottles of oxygen.

Pitzer said that there were as many as 40 firefighters on scene Saturday and many of them went through five or six oxygen tanks.

Managing manpower was as much a challenge as fighting the fire itself, he said. Firefighters needed to be relieved to regain their composure and get fresh air, while fresh personnel went in to battle the blaze.

“At some points, I couldn’t get them rehabilitated fast enough,” Pitzer said.

While exhausting and at times overwhelming, most everyone escaped the incident unscathed. Pizter said one firefighter needed an IV for dehydration, but was then able to return to combat. Another sustained a minor hand injury but has been cleared medically and will return to duty today.

Pitzer said the fire was one of the most challenging he has dealt with in his career.

“The fire kept traveling and dropping down into adjacent units,” he said. “We actively had to battle some units that were rekindling. We’d knock it down, and move down the line and put those out, and then the first one would start up again.”

He said many units were packed floor-to-ceiling and front-to-back and much time was taken up with removing items so the firefighters could be sure they had fully extinguished the fire in that unit.

The composition of the building did not make matters any easier.

“Everything is metal, so access was a challenge,” he said. “Everything was melting, and it was very hot.”

Firefighters usually use rotary saws to cut through metal, but the thick smoke cut off oxygen that the tools’ motors require to run.

“So we had saws choking out and we had to take them out of rotation and give them a chance to breathe and try to restart them. It was very time-consuming, and time was not on our side,” he said.

Pitzer said he also understands the frustration of those who want access to their storage units but the fire is actively under investigation by the fire marshal.

In addition to the matter of safety, he said the scene must be preserved for its evidentiary value.

“We can’t have people going through an area we’re trying to investigate, because we need to be able to look for clues as to what may have started it,” he said. “And that would be made much more difficult with people going in and out of there.”