DELTON, MICH. — Monday morning, a massive fire in Delton left a longtime business destroyed, and smoke from the fire forced nearby schools to send students home for the day.
“It was kind of a shock, kind of a shock to me,” said Smith & Doster employee Jack Howard.
He can’t believe the place he worked at for 20 years is gone.
“I got a call from a buddy of mine earlier. He said it all caught on fire. Are you kidding me?“ said Howard.
Witnesses say the fire started around 7:30 a.m. Monday inside the 100-year-old Smith & Doster, which specialized in car sales and service.
“I was just sitting in my car, and I happened to look up and I saw a bunch of black smoke,” said Delton Kellogg Schools Superintendent Jeremy Wright.
He says students were just arriving for school when he saw that the nearby business was on fire.
Wright said, “Then we started hearing, like, explosions. And there were things going on and people came up to me and said, 'The building's on fire; what are we going to do?'”
Superintendent Wright says he immediately moved the elementary school students to the gym of the nearby middle school and then canceled school for the entire district because of potential danger.
“It's probably best just to call it, because they didn't know what was in the air, what's in the building, what's going on, and as that was going on, you could hear explosions pretty regularly. So, we just made the call to be safe and let everybody go home,” said Wright.
Fire officials have not released the cause of the fire but the main building and the cars inside are destroyed.
Howard said, “It’s just a shame that it is gone.”
Delton Kellogg Schools say they are airing out the elementary building and plan to have all the schools open Tuesday morning.
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