SAN DIEGO — The San Diego Fire Department responded to a non-injury fire at a strip mall Wednesday in Oak Park.
The call was received at 4:05 a.m. and units arrived to the strip mall in the 1700 block of Euclid Avenue just before 4:10 a.m., according to the SDFD.
When firefighters arrived, there was a trash dumpster on fire causing a lot of smoke. After several minutes, fire erupted into the attic and through the roof of the strip mall destroying multiple businesses including a barber shop and a cell phone store.
Firefighters were able to protect three of the seven businesses in the strip mall, while the other businesses were extensively damaged. There was also extensive water damage to the building, according to authorities.
"There's a total of six or seven businesses in the strip mall, four of those have extensive damage and three of those have some damage but we were able to save about a third of the strip mall," the fire battalion chief said.
It took about 100 firefighters from San Diego and Heartland National City departments to put out the blaze that was upgraded to a three-alarm fire as the flames erupted.
The extensive amount of water used to put out the fire caused some flooding to nearby homes on Marilou Road and Altadena Avenue, which is the area right behind the stores that were on fire. The water ran off into the streets behind the fire scene, flooding the driveways and backyards of some of those homes. Crews tried to redirect the water with shovels.
CBS 8 spoke with one of the residents who woke up to the news of the fire and the flooding in his backyard.
"There was about 3-4 feet of water in my backyard going down from the hillside, so it broke down my retaining wall for the water to potentially try and save my backyard, but the retaining wall did end up breaking from the amount of water used to put out the fire," he said.
Euclid Avenue between Federal Boulevard and Elm Street were closed due to the firefighter activity.
Investigators from the Metro Arson Strike Team were investigating the cause of the fire and no damage estimate was immediately made available.