Authorities are investigating what caused the massive two-alarm fire on Sept. 14 that gutted another warehouse near Downtown Evansville.
Billows of thick black smoke spurted into the air that afternoon and evening at Pikeโs Mattress, 213 W. Division St. About 60 Evansville Fire Department personnel and 13 apparatus responded to the call. Three went to a hospital for heat stress-related conditions, including one who was admitted for overnight observation and then released, says Kim Garrett, EFDโs deputy chief of administration.
The three-story family-owned business now is an unrecognizable heap of charred bricks and debris, with holes burned into its streetside sign. Two nearby billboards facing westbound traffic on Division Street are melted and unreadable. A neighboring building supplier, Benthall Brothers at 15 Read St., sustained some structural damage as well.
Mattresses were manufactured and sold at the property, Garrett says.
The fire occurred during a celebratory period for Pikeโs Mattress. Three days prior, the business announced a transition to fourth-generation owners Alice Pike and Jessica Mitchell-Schnelle, as well as a grand re-opening sale.
โThank you to everyone who is praying for us,โ reads a Sept. 15 post on the Pikeโs Mattress Facebook page. โThankfully, no one was in the building. We will update when we know something.โ
Two days later, another post says the business โ(plans) to be back as soon as possible.โ
The Indiana State Fire Marshal assisted Evansville firefighters with the investigation. On Oct. 10, EFD officials released a statement saying its investigators, along with the Indiana
State Fire Marshal Office, ruled the cause of the fire “undetermined.”
โThey are still conducting interviews of the owners and occupants and nearby people to see if they can garner any more information as to how the fire may have started,โ Garrett says.
The situation at the scene escalated fast. Initial 911 calls arrived at 4:09 p.m. Ten minutes later, Garrett says, the incident commander called for the second alarm.
The fire quickly vented through the roof, Garrett says. The first wall of the 74-year-old building fell by 4:50 p.m., โand shortly thereafter, we had our first firefighter that unfortunately had to go to the hospital.โ
By 5:41 p.m., all the walls and interior floors had collapsed. Two EFD crews and four apparatus monitored the scene for hotspots overnight.
Other warehouses near Downtown caught fire on Oct. 17, 2022, at 119 N. Morton Ave., and Dec. 31, 2022, in the 1400 and 1500 blocks of North Garvin Street. The Morton fire was found to be caused by an open flame started by people inside the vacant warehouse, while the North Garvin fire was blamed on an electrical accident. Investigators said arson was the culprit in a May 17, 2023, fire at the former Pearl Cleaners site, 428 N.W. Third St.
Garrett noted that the 27,612-square-foot Pikeโs Mattress building is smaller than the 260,000-square-foot warehouse on Morton and the more than 1 million-square-foot building on Garvin, but still it was a challenging and dangerous situation for firefighters, in part because of the hot temperatures on Sept. 14.
In addition to the mattresses inside the warehouse, โthe building itself is heavy timber, so that’s going to put off a lot of heat,โ Garrett says. โWe’re sitting here with the Lloyd Expressway and the wall, and it was just kind of bouncing off it, so the radiated heat was coming back. It wasn’t really dissipating, and that just created a lot of heat even around the perimeter of the fire, in addition to how hot it was outside.โ
