It took firefighters from several town an entire night to put out a four-alarm fire that broke out at a municipal warehouse in New Jersey Thursday night.
The blaze at Edison's Department of Public Works warehouse broke out just after 10:30 p.m.
Structural damage at the warehouse on New Durham Road may have damaged above-ground gas pipes, fueling the flames, according to the Edison Fire Department. Early Friday morning, utility crews searched for any broken gas lines that may have been fueling any flames that remained.
No one was inside the warehouse, but homes alongside the building were evacuated for a few hours. Neighbor Sangeeta Patel showed NBC 4 New York how the melted siding on her home, a chilling reminder of how close the fire came to destroying it.
"It was terrible," she said. "My husband all of a sudden came up and said 'Everything behind us is all orange, what's going on?' We opened up the shades and it was all flaming up."
Mookie Mendez, another neighbor, said, "You could actually see the building crumble down, the top of the building. I watched the whole thing, it was crazy."
The fire was the fourth at a DPW facility over the past three years.
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"This is the second structure this year," said Edison Fire Chief Ken Milcsik. "We had a salt dome that they put road salt in, that burned a couple years ago. We had garbage trucks, we've had some other things, some vehicles."
