Wednesday started early for the firefighters of Nassau County. Way too early.
At 8:14 a.m. on April 8, the Glenwood Fire Department answered a 911 call for a fire burning inside a storage building on the grounds of Big Valley Nursery at 532 Cedar Swamp Road in Glen Head. What they found when they got there required backup. Lots of it.
By the time the fire was contained, roughly 150 firefighters from a dozen departments had rolled to the scene. The Glen Cove, Jericho, Roslyn, Manhasset-Lakeville, Sea Cliff, Oyster Bay, East Norwich, Locust Valley, Albertson, Westbury and Bethpage Fire Departments all sent personnel. That’s not a routine call. That’s a sustained, serious fight.
It took about two hours to get the blaze under control, according to Michael Uttaro, the Nassau County fire marshal. Three firefighters sustained minor injuries during that stretch and were treated on site. No civilians were hurt. The storage building, though, took a beating. Part of it collapsed, and the structure sustained what Uttaro called serious fire damage.
The building stored landscaping and gardening supplies. Fertilizers were among the materials inside, which raised an obvious question about air quality for nearby residents. The Nassau County Fire Marshal Hazardous Materials Response Team investigated and found no air quality issues that would pose a danger to neighboring communities, according to Uttaro, who said the team is continuing to monitor the property. A propane tank on the grounds was not affected by the fire.
Cedar Swamp Road shut down in both directions for hours. Nassau County Police Department said traffic was restored by 2 p.m., which means a solid chunk of the morning commute ran into that closure. Not ideal.
Big Valley Nursery has been on that corner since 1969. Fifty-seven years. The business is family-run and focuses on outdoor power equipment, snow removal equipment and masonry supplies, which makes it exactly the kind of local operation that long-time Nassau County residents tend to have a strong, specific relationship with. You don’t just lose a building in a fire like that. You lose inventory, momentum, and weeks or months of the spring season, which is when a nursery and outdoor equipment dealer does a substantial share of its annual business.
The cause of the fire remains under investigation.
Spring fires in structures that hold fertilizers, fuels, and equipment are their own category of problem. The National Fire Protection Association has documented repeatedly how agricultural and horticultural supply storage can accelerate fire spread in ways that catch crews off guard. The sheer number of departments that responded here, 12 in total, tells you the incident commanders weren’t taking any chances.
Still, the coordination worked. Getting 150 firefighters from departments spread across Nassau County’s north shore to operate together on a scene like this one, on a Wednesday morning with commuter traffic already on the roads, is not a small logistical accomplishment. The Nassau County Fire Marshal’s Office oversees fire investigation and hazmat response across the county and its mutual aid network covers exactly these kinds of multi-department calls.
The reporting from Long Island Press has been the most thorough on this story, and credit to photographer Casey Fahrer for the on-scene images that showed the scale of the damage to the building.
What comes next for Big Valley Nursery is unclear. A fire investigation takes time, and rebuilding a collapsed commercial structure takes considerably more. For a family business that has operated continuously for more than five decades in Nassau County, the resilience is probably baked in. That doesn’t make the hit any smaller.
Three firefighters went home with minor injuries on Wednesday. Given what those 150 men and women walked into at 8:14 on a spring morning, with fertilizer storage and a propane tank both factors on the property, that outcome deserves to be recognized plainly for what it is. Fortunate.
Glen Head is a hamlet in the Town of Oyster Bay, in Nassau County’s north shore. Cedar Swamp Road runs through a mix of residential and commercial properties. Neighbors in that area woke up on April 8 to smoke and road closures and the particular unease of watching a local institution burn. The fire marshal’s hazmat team clearing the air quality question helped. But the investigation is ongoing, and Big Valley Nursery’s spring season has been changed in ways that won’t be clear for a while yet.