Carmel Valley Village fire devastates local businesses.

The Carmel Valley Center Street Marketplace building was a recipe for disaster. 

The old wooden building had no fire sprinklers. Filled with flammable material inside like art and glass blowing studios, it was already on the Monterey County Fire Protection District’s radar before it went up in flames in the early morning of Wednesday, Oct. 28. 

It started in the offices behind the Center Street Marketplace, then jumped to one of the main structures of the marketplace and a nearby home, according to Justin Linquist, a division chief with the Monterey County Regional Fire Protection District. 

“There was nothing left,” Deborah Russell says of arriving to the marketplace to see her friends’ studio completely gutted, as well as damage to her art studio, Peridot Fine Art. “That’s when I started to cry.” 

According to Linquist, a report initially came in just before 3am of a structure fire at Center Street in Carmel Valley. They arrived to find heavy fire and smoke in the office buildings behind the southern building of the Center Street marketplace, which displaced one person. 

The fire spread to the southern building of the marketplace, where it tore through several businesses. It also spread to a nearby home, caused significant damage there and displaced a family, Linquist says. 

One person went to the hospital as a precaution, but nobody was injured, Linquist says.

They called in every single fire agency in Monterey County, from Community Emergency Response teams to law enforcement to ambulance services to other fire departments. The cause of the fire is unknown right now, Linquist says. 

The fire didn’t reach the whole shopping center. According to William Bradford, manager of Jerome’s Carmel Valley Market, the market went unscathed. There was minimal smoke in the store, and no water damage, Bradford says, and they plan to reopen at their normal 7am time on Thursday, Oct. 29. 

“Absolutely I was concerned, not just about our store, but everybody else’s business as well, because we’re one big family down there,” Bradford says. 

As the fire lit up, so did the phones of neighbors—text messages, calls and social media posts swirled about the fire as neighbors warned each other. 

“My office is going to burn down,” was the first thought business owner Tony Scardina the moment after he heard about the fire. He was able to salvage some computers, but much of his construction equipment was water damaged from the firefighters’ hoses.

By 10am, the fire had reached a point where firefighters didn’t believe it would reoccur, and fire crews spent the rest of the morning doing clean up work, Linquist says. 

Greg Profeta, a cofounder of the Carmel Valley CERT, grabbed N95 masks as he headed out the door to respond to the fire early in the morning—from his home just a few hundred feet away, he could feel the choking smoke. 

Residents and business owners had been trickling in all morning—CERT had to close off the streets and keep bystanders at bay. At one point, Profeta says that worried business owners were allowed a closer look at some of their shops, and they took down a list of names to contact everyone later. 

“It's a hub for the community,” Profeta says. “All these businesses here are local business owners, there’s no franchises here, we all know them.” 

Profeta pointed out how interconnected the marketplace is with the community and his life—Jerome’s Carmel Valley Market did the food for his wedding, he brought his cats to the vet in the same shopping center, he bought art from the studios. He even personally knows his FedEx guy. 

“It was heartbreaking,” Profeta says.