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Fire leaves farmers high and dry

By S.I. ROSENBAUM
Published September 29, 2005

DOVER - Bo Dunlap stood in a wilderness of black ash and twisted metal. A tilted cabinet spilled out charred files as delicate as a moth's wing.

"This is what's left of my office," Dunlap said.

Tuesday night, James Irrigation at 14042 E Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. burned to the ground. For five years, the store has been a fixture in the lives of local farmers.

It's the only big irrigation-supply store in the area, and its demise will leave some farmers high and dry at the end of planting season.

"It's a bad time to happen," said employee Vernon Niswanger, "but it's better than a month ago."

Most farmers already have taken care of their irrigation needs, Niswanger said. But the store lost its files, its catalogs, its computers.

Dunlop, the manager, doesn't know what orders they have placed with supply companies. He doesn't know what his customers, who often settle at the end of the month, owe the store.

Since the fire, customers have been stopping by, offering to help, trying to remember what they owe. "There were people out here last night trying to hand them a check while it was still burning," Niswanger said.

Wednesday, they were still coming.

"What can I do?" one customer asked Dunlop.

"Nothing you can do," he said.

His family owned the store back when it was Dover Hardware. When they sold it out to James Irrigation, Dunlop went to work for the new owners. "Twenty-eight years of my life in that building," he said.

Dunlop's cell phone rang. "Completely," he said into it. "To the ground."

The store owner, Joseph B. James of Bradenton, owns two other irrigation stores, one in Bradenton and one in Bainbridge, Ga. For now, the few goods that weren't destroyed from the Dover store will be moved to a temporary site at 2004 National Guard Drive in Plant City.

A truck pulled up. "Was it lightning?" Mickey Oliver wanted to know. He's not a farmer, but he comes to the store for hardware.

"Don't know," Dunlop said. "Wasn't here."

"Didn't leave much, did it?" Oliver asked.

"Didn't leave nothing," said Dunlop.

"Only memories," said Niswanger.

The fire started sometime before 5:40 p.m. Hillsborough County fire inspector John Wisniewski said he wasn't yet sure what caused the fire, but that it appeared accidental.

When the Dover-Turkey Creek Volunteer Fire Department arrived, flames were shooting through the roof.

Chief Mark Curts was first on the scene. Soon after he arrived, he said, the windows blew out. Six firefighters went inside, but chemicals inside the store were exploding, so he ordered them back out.

The greatest problem, Curts said, was the lack of water to fight the fire. There are no hydrants in the area. The firefighters tried to hook up to a private hydrant at a nearby shrimp plant, but they couldn't get the pump to work.

If they'd had water, Curts said, they could have saved parts of the building. "Without a doubt," he said.

Instead, just about everything that could burn in the mostly wood-and-plywood building was consumed.

Curts paused to talk to Dunlop. "If you need anything, call me," he said.

"They'll survive it," Curts said later. "They're good people."

Dunlop picked up the charred computer whose hard drive once stored all the records. He has been told there's a 4-percent chance of recovering the data. "My only hope," he said.

"We're just trying to keep all these farmers going," he told another customer who had come to offer help.

"We'll be back here one day," he added.

[Last modified September 29, 2005, 01:18:09]