Fire Causes $1.2 Million in Damages to California Coast CU Branch, Call Center
No employees were working when the blaze began on Saturday night.
A weekend fire caused an estimated $1.2 million in damages to a two-story branch/call center of the $3.4 billion California Coast Credit Union in San Diego, according to the San Diego Fire-Rescue Department.
When firefighters arrived at the Kearny Mesa branch on Ruffin Road at 9:26 p.m. on Saturday, they saw flames shooting from the building’s roof. Though fire crews initially entered the building to fight the fire, conditions quickly became dangerous and they resumed their efforts to douse the flames from outside, the SDFRD said.
Fire officials said the building’s roof collapsed.
The second floor housed a call center and a kitchen, and the first floor housed the branch operations.
“The roof collapsed and that prevented our investigators from entering the building to search for a cause,” Mónica Muñoz, SDFRD’s media services manager, said. “If it’s not safe to enter, they don’t go inside. So the cause will be documented as undetermined.”
More than 80 firefighters were at the scene and some of them remained there throughout the night to extinguish a few flare ups.
The estimated $1.2 million in damages were determined by a national standard from the U.S. Fire Administration, a division of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, according to the SDFRD.
“The fire was pretty much confined to the second floor. In fact, the first floor (which housed the branch operations) was surprisingly less affected than you would imagine,” Robert Scheid, California Coast CU’s director of community and public relations, said. “However it doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily usable, so that building will be closed until further notice while we look at the safety, security, and the use of that building and figure out how to move forward.”
No one was working at the branch/call center when the fire broke out because it is closed on Saturdays. Since the pandemic began, most of the call center’s employees have been working remotely. About five people worked at the branch and about 40 to 50 employees worked at the call center pre-pandemic.
Although the branch did not have safe deposit boxes, all of its documents, files and other information have been safely secured, Scheid said.
“We also have a number of very close-by branches, so we don’t expect there to be a real big inconvenience for members who used that branch,” he said.