Maryland consignment store left with significant damage from space heater fire in upstairs apartment
Nearly $170,000 of inventory at a Harford County consignment store was damaged by smoke and water from a fire caused by a space heater in an upstairs apartment on Friday, Feb. 14.
Olivia's Shop on Conowingo Road in Bel Air is left cleaning up 15 years of items that now lay in a pile of char. The store sells second-hand high-end items that are owned by approximately 350 people.
"People don't realize that each one of these items is owned by somebody else," said Jarod Thurston, who owns Olivia's Shop. "So I don't know how you clean it, take the tag off, and keep track of everything. It's almost like a total loss. Right now, I have no idea how we're going to pay them."
The two-story building has a store on the first floor and an apartment on the second.
The fire
According to the Maryland Fire Marshal's Office, a 7-year-old boy woke up to the flames and alerted his family to evacuate. The woman, her mother, and her two children escaped, along with their two dogs.
Thankfully, no one was hurt, but Thurston arrived to flames and smoke coming from the windows.
"What the camera is not going to be able to show is the smoke damage," Thurston said. "This was all black in here when I came, and I live 10 minutes away. As soon as I got here, it was completely black. All this here, you couldn't see nothing, it was all black."
Firefighters contained the fire in the bedroom and an adjacent room. There was heat, smoke and water damage through the second floor, fire officials said.
"This is how I survive"
Thurston started an online fundraiser to pay back the consignors and bring his business back to life.
"This is my livelihood, this is how I survive," Thurston said. "So now I'm in a limbo period until we know three months, six months, until we know when we'll be back in business. And until then, there's really nothing I can do."
