A suspicious fire that erupted shortly before 2 a.m. Tuesday in the Save Mart shopping center on North Main Street and Louise Avenue posed a serious threat to the four commercial buildings clustered on the busy street corner.
The fire, which started in the old wooden fence against which a utility storage shed was standing, was right at the foot of a steep concrete with iron railing stairway ascending to the second floor of Cardoza Enterprises. The wooden fence, though, ran around the shed and onto the north side of the building.
It was one of six suspicious fires overnight that included dumspter fires and a fire in a vacant lot behind the Valero gas station on East Yosemite Avenue.
Threatened by the fire in addition to the Cardoza building which formerly housed a Century 21 real estate business were Jiffy Lube and the vacant shell of the former Long John Silvers restaurant next door on the south side and a Mexican restaurant on the opposite side.
But it was the oil-change business outfit that really worried Nicholas Young, the security guard who was working the graveyard shift patrolling the three Cardoza shopping centers at the North Main and Louise Avenue intersection, “because that’s a big bomb with all the oils there,” he said. “I was afraid of that going off because that’s a big bomb.”
The only area that is not part of the commercial complex at this intersection is the one on the southwest corner where Walgreens is located.
Quick action by the three Manteca firefighters who came in the one engine from the Louise Avenue station right next to the western section of the Cardoza shopping centers immediately put out the fire before it could do any more damage. About a couple of minutes after the fire call was placed, the shed was already fully involved in the flames. The firefighters immediately put out the fire before it even got close the Cardoza building. The shed, which contained an old Century 21 sign and other placards, was completely gutted.
The fire appeared to have been deliberately set, according to initial investigations at the scene.
Young said he did not notice the beginning of the fire because he was patrolling on his bicycle the section of Cardoza Center on the west side. He said he learned about it from employees at Carl’s Jr., just across the street from the old Long Johns Silvers, who called him on the phone about the suspicious smoke coming from that direction.
Young said he immediately contacted the owners of the Cardoza building about the fire.
Two Manteca Police patrol cars which were in the commercial center’s parking lot behind the Cardoza building were seen talking with some individuals who were at the area at the time of the fire. Investigation as to the origin of this fire is continuing.
Less than two hours after this fire incident in the Cardoza Center, another fire broke out in the Waffle and Chubby’s commercial center next to the Golden West School’s ball fields on North Main Street barely a skip and a hop away. That fire gutted the entire commercial complex in the back which housed a bar and grill, a beauty salon, and a Filipino store. Two of the units in the building complex were vacant.
