A fire broke out early on Friday morning, July 21st, at C&B Linen on Andrew Jackson Drive. The call came in shortly after midnight, just as a fierce lightning storm was moving through the area.
Wayne County EMA Director Brian Smith said that the National Weather Service reported a lot of cloud-to-ground lightning at the time of the fire, and that the cause of the fire has been preliminarily declared as a lightning strike.
Firefighters from Waynesboro City, Station 1 (Waynesboro), Station 8 (Eagle Creek), and Station 9 (Ovilla) responded to the fire. The Waynesboro City Police Department was also there to assist.
The new building and all its contents have been declared a total loss. Owner Jason Crews said that he estimates the cost of the loss, including the building and all its contents, is in the millions of dollars. “When we built this new building last year, we tried to include everything possible to mitigate fire damage if the building were to catch on fire. Unfortunately, a direct lightning strike is something that cannot be predicted or stopped.”
Crews said on Friday that they moved into their new building on Andrew Jackson Drive in November of 2022. The facility employs approximately 20 people, and Crews assured us that none of the employees will lose their jobs due to the fire. “Fortunately, we still have some equipment in our old building on South Main Street and in our warehouse on the Highway 64 bypass,” Crews said. “We were actually able to run most of our routes today. We wanted to ensure our hospital customers that their services would continue in spite of the fire.”
“I saw with my own eyes just how hard our volunteer firefighters worked to save my building,” said Crews. “They worked tirelessly for hours to contain the fire and salvage anything they could. Our community should be very proud of these volunteers for their dedication to this very difficult job.”
C&B Linen provides industrial linens to several facilities in Tennessee, along with other states in the southeast. Crews said that the concrete pad the burned building sat on can hopefully be salvaged, and rebuilding can begin soon. He estimated that a new building would take five to six months to be built.
