Fire Destroys Lemon Warehouse

An investigation into the cause of a blaze that gutted a Camarillo packinghouse full of lemons may be delayed several days while workers pump more than 200,000 gallons of water from the warehouse’s basement, fire officials said Friday.

“It looks like a big old vat of stale lemonade,” said John Wade, a spokesman for the Ventura County Fire Department. “It’s a mess.”

The water was sprayed by firefighters battling the three-alarm fire that erupted near midnight Thursday at the Paramount Citrus Assn., a 45,000-square-foot structure at 215 Dawson Drive in an industrial area east of the city’s downtown.

The fire, to which 60 firefighters responded, caused an estimated $7 million in damage and destroyed 24 tons of lemons, 14 tons of which were stored in the basement.

The loss is a fraction of the county’s lemon crop, which last year totaled 341,630 tons from seven packinghouses, said Ken Weiss, Ventura County’s deputy agricultural commissioner.

John O’Brien, chief financial officer for Paramount Citrus, said the company, which handled the output of 25 Ventura County growers, will ask other packinghouses to handle the remainder of this year’s crop.

He said the firm hopes to rebuild the one-story packinghouse, although not necessarily on the same site. “This is not the end of our business in Camarillo,” he said.

The packinghouse was one of three operated by the firm, with the others in Kern and Fresno counties. The company is selling a fourth packinghouse in San Diego County.

Fire officials originally feared that the water may have been so contaminated by paints and solvents in the basement that workers would have to take special steps to dispose of it.

However, an investigation Friday by the county’s Department of Environmental Health concluded that the water posed no risk.

“The amount of chemicals is small compared to the amount of water,” said Greg Smith, an environmental health specialist.

Fire officials said they had not determined the cause of the fire in the 68-year-old building, which was undergoing renovation.