Early Morning Fire Guts Anaheim Pet Store

Except for one turtle who crawled to safety and two others who found refuge in a bucket, the devastation from the early-morning fire was complete at the Reef Tropical Fish and Pets store in Anaheim.

Twenty hamsters, 20 mice, six rats, six iguanas and 30 to 40 birds, including finches, cockatiels and parakeets, died in the blaze discovered about 1:30 a.m. Friday, said owner Theeravut Phromratanapongse.

“We stocked up right before Christmas. Every case was full,” he said.

As for the fish, Phromratanapongse isn’t even sure how many he lost--the now-gutted store had 200 tanks for freshwater fish, each containing five to 80 specimens. And he had nearly the same number of saltwater fish, he said.

From simple goldfish to neon-striped tetras, from guppies to mean Oscars--”they eat the other fish, so the boys like that”--Phromratanapongse said he had every imaginable type of tropical fish in stock, from as far away as South America and Singapore.

Incredibly, though, he found two turtles in a bucket who somehow survived, and he gave them to a niece. A third was rescued while crawling across the sidewalk after it was spotted by workmen boarding up the building.

Because of the danger of collapse from what remained of the roof, firefighters wouldn’t let the owner back into the La Palma Avenue building to see if anything else survived.

“We feel really sorry for them, but there’s not much we could do for them,” Phromratanapongse said. “That heat in there, most of them would have been gone already.”

Freddie Lua, a clerk at M&M; Liquor, housed in the same Granada Square shopping center as the pet store, said he was in the parking lot with a friend after closing up shop early Friday when they spotted the flames inside the pet store. A parking lot security guard called the Fire Department, he said.

“It started going through the front, and then the glass exploded,” Lua said.

It took 35 firefighters from Anaheim, Fullerton, Orange and Orange County Fire Authority to get the fire under control by 2:25 a.m. The building sustained about $315,000 in damage, while $100,000 worth of the contents were lost, said Anaheim Fire Inspector Robyn Butler.

The cause is still under investigation, Butler said, but the origin does not appear suspicious.

Phromratanapongse came to the United States from Thailand to study engineering, but he couldn’t find a job after graduating with his master’s degree in 1987. An in-law owned a pet store, which gave Phromratanapongse and his wife the idea to try the business.

He said they recently changed insurance agents, though, and he fears they may be covered for only one-quarter to one-third of their losses.

“We started with almost nothing, and now we’re down to nothing,” he said.

While examining the rubble Friday, several patrons stopped by and offered any help they could give.

“We’ve been there a long time,” Phromratanapongse said. “We have a lot of nice customers. Most of the customers have come in since they were young, and now they come in with their kids.”

“Everything was in there. We worked hard for that for 10 years,” he said. “We didn’t make a lot of money on that, we just tried to survive.”