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Salt Lake City fire investigators say a generator's hot exhaust stack likely ignited a blaze on the roof of the Nordstrom store inside the new City Creek Center mall Wednesday morning.
The 7 a.m. blaze brought 40 firefighters rushing to the downtown Salt Lake City shopping development, which had just opened on March 22. Crews chopped holes in the store's roof near the stack and quickly extinguished the flames, said Salt Lake City Fire Department spokesman Jasen Asay.
"When our firefighters arrived, flames were coming out of the (store's) exhaust stack," he said. "They cut holes around the stack and sprayed water down it and quickly extinguished the fire."
About 25 employees were evacuated and the store was closed while investigators and store officials cleared the scene, Asay said. The store was expected to be fully back in business Thursday. No injuries were reported.
It was not believed there was any connection between the outbreak of the blaze at Nordstrom and the return of electrical service, about the same time, to the nearby City Creek apartments after an outage residents estimated as lasting seven hours.
Asay said investigators had determined the fire was accidental, and that "the actual fire did not spread to the interior" of the store.
"[The fire was] a result of a generator's exhaust pipe coming into proximity with combustible roof decking material," Asay added.
The backup generator at Nordstrom had been left running through the night due to what Rocky Mountain Power spokeswoman Margaret Ohler confirmed had been a "planned outage" in the area. That outage specifically affected the apartments between 11 p.m. Tuesday and 6 a.m. Wednesday. The utility's crews completed scheduled work on distribution lines in the area without incident, she said.
More than an hour after that work was done, Rocky Mountain at the fire department's request returned workers to the scene to turn off power to Nordstrom for firefighter safety reasons. Ohler said there was no indication of the earlier electrical work having any direct cause-and-effect connection to the later fire at the store.
The fire did not affect any of the other businesses inside the sprawling, $2 billion shopping center.
Damage inside Nordstrom was still being assessed, but Asay said early indications were that fire, water and smoke damage had been contained to the area of the roof. "We have no reports of merchandise having been lost," he said.