A fire broke out at a 40-plus-year-old auto repair shop in Victorville, sending up a thick plume of black and gray smoke Friday morning.
The Victorville Fire Department responded shortly before 9:30 a.m. “to a reported structure fire in the area near Palmdale and Amargosa roads,” city spokeswoman Sue Jones said.
Firefighters arrived to find heavy fire coming from the store, Loveland’s Automotive Service Inc., in the 15200 block of Palmdale Road.
“Crews launched an aggressive interior attack that prevented the fire from spreading to other vehicles in the original building or nearby structures,” Jones said.
No injuries were reported. The cause of the fire turned out to be accidental.
The city did not provide further details on the cause or the extent of the damage to the store.
Phone calls to the store were unsuccessful on Friday afternoon.
Loveland’s has served the area since 1978, according to its website.
“As far as I know, this is the oldest continuously operated car service of the same name from the same location in the high desert,” owner Mike Loveland told the Daily Press in 1999.
Loveland won first place in 2020 in the “Auto Repair – Freelance” category of the newspaper’s Best of the Desert competition.
Daily Press journalist Martin Estacio can be reached at 760-955-5358 or ME [email protected] Follow him on Twitter @DP_mestacio.
