Clovis officials investigating series of fires

link Staff photo: Aubry Buzek

The Clovis Fire Department spent Sunday night fighting a large fire at the Paper Recycling Depot on East Curry Avenue. The blaze was one of several fires in Clovis over a 24 hour period.

Frank Lasky and his children have been part of the Clovis business community for 19 years. They did a job they said no one else wanted, at one point processing more than 100 tons of recycled paper per month.

On Sunday their business burned.

“I built this business with my sons, and now it’s all gone,” said Frank Lasky, the owner of the Paper Recycling Depot. “We had our whole lives invested in this.”

The outside structure of the large brick building is intact; the inside of the building sustained the most damage. Lasky said one of the most important parts of a recycling business, the baler used to process the recycled paper, is burned and the electrical parts are probably gone.

He said rebuilding the business would “cost a fortune …” because “ … they don’t sell insurance to paper recycling centers.”

Lasky’s son Arron, part owner of the Paper Recycling Depot, has similar reservations about trying to revive the business.

“Honestly to tell you the truth at this point what I am going to look into doing is just getting it cleaned and just getting rid of the property,” Arron Lasky said. “The way I look at it, even if I do get it back going again how long is it going to be until somebody does this again?”

Clovis Fire Marshal Allan Silvers declined to comment on the cause of the fire. He did say it featured two “suspicious” incendiary ignition points.

The Sunday night fire was the third in a 24-hour period in the same area of Clovis. A fourth nearby fire on Nov. 21 claimed the former Guadalajara restaurant on L. Casillas Boulevard, several blocks west of the Paper Recycling Depot.

Officials have not determined the cause of any of the four and declined to speculate on whether they are related.

Silvers said the Guadalajara fire was “suspicious because before that fire we did respond to that same location a week earlier for two-or-three spot fires inside the building that were incendiary in nature.”

Police arrested a suspect in connection with a Saturday night fire at Auto World east of the paper recycling facility and said the same person may have been involved in a Saturday night fire at an auto dealer in Portales.

The cause of a weekend shed fire on Gidding Street is also under investigation, officials said.