Fire forces evacuation of fast food restaurant

Customers of a fast food restaurant forced to flee because of a backroom fire say they are shaken and upset, but cannot remember hearing a fire alarm going off.

Firefighters responded to a fire in the McDonald's restaurant on Memorial Avenue around 3 p.m. Monday. Staff and patrons vacated the restaurant and stood back as fire crews entered the smoke filled building.

Melanie Gottfred, a frequent customer of the restaurant, had gone to the McDonald's with her five-year-old and eight-year-old daughters just before the fire started. She said she believes there was not enough communication between staff and the customers and she didn’t hear any alarms.

"(A grandmother and her grandchildren) were in the play place sitting by themselves," Gottfred said. "I heard (there was a fire) so I ran in there and told them we needed to leave. There wasn’t much communication to the customers. There was no alarm. We don’t know where the fire alarms were but we didn’t hear them."

A grandmother, who refused to give her name to tbnewswatch.com, told reporters that she had visited the restaurant with her three grandchildren and said she was upset.

The grandmother said it was Gottfred who had instructed her to leave the building.

"She came and said you have to vacate there is a fire and then she helped me out with my three (grandchildren)," she said. "I don’t know how I would have done it so quickly otherwise."

With all the commotion outside, one customer wandered into the restaurant while firefighters were still working in the back. Police rushed in after him and brought him back outside without incident.

John Mill, platoon chief with the Vickers Street Fire Station, said he wouldn’t know the cause of the fire until they conducted an investigation. The fire started at the back of the restaurant in a storage area and then spread to a freezer inside of the building.

There were no injuries reported as a result of the blaze.

"When our guys pulled up, there was huge clouds of black smoke," Mill said. "Fortunately, it was confined to the back of the building."

Mill said the size of the fire should have set off the fire alarms but didn’t know for sure if they had gone off. The investigation would eventually determine if the alarms had been set off, he said.

Richard Blake, manager of the Red River Road McDonald's restaurant, came down to look at the damage and what happened. The standard procedure for a fire is to get the customers out safety and then make sure all staff members are out of the building, he said.

"I talked to the staff and I know they went around and getting people to leave the restaurant," Blake said. "I know they mentioned some people were drinking coffee and I don’t think they believed them at the time. But we got everyone out safely and that’s really key to me."

The manager said he assumed the restaurant would be closed, but wasn’t sure for how long.