Nearly 150 burned cars now fill Jason Rol’s lot at his car shop, Rol Race Motorsports, north of Denver. After a grass fire on Wednesday, his Thornton business estimates a total of nearly $1 million in damages across all his lots.
When flames first appeared, Rol tried to use a garden hose, but the fire grew too fast for him to keep up.
“All I could think was ‘get water.’ Even though it was by the time I had done anything, it spread so much that there was nothing that the water was going to do,” he said. “It looks like a bomb went off in here. And that’s what many people who have stopped by said — that it looks like a movie set.”
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The fire injured a handful of people in Thornton and burned almost everything in Rol’s lot. Rol says each car here has a story.
“This was a Lexus parts car that belonged to Andrew. He had a full drivetrain behind that that he was going to swap into his grandfather’s truck,” Rol said, “We’re trying to put together a list of everything that was lost here to kind of show people what was actually on this lot and not just junk.”
Rol says a lot of the cars in the lot are largely not insured as many were being worked on for parts rather than regularly on the road.
One of Rol’s customers, Zach Zimberoff, owns Euro Garage in Thornton and stored many of the BMWs he used for parts at this garage. Zumberoff says he expects to be out thousands of dollars.
“My friend got in here and sent me pictures, and I was just devastated,” Zimberoff said. “Even a day before the fire, two people were messaging me on getting parts off some of these cars.”
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Authorities are still working to determine the official cause of the grass fire. In the meantime, Rol is working to call every customer and figure out a clean-up plan alongside an online fundraiser.
“Lots of people who have pledged their time and resources to come and assist in the cleanup,” Rol said. “I honestly didn’t think that we would have the amount of people that cared so much.”
Rol thinks the cleanup could take weeks or even months.
“You have to be part of a community to kind of realize what was lost here,” he said. “It was just people trying to spend what little money they had to build their dream cars.”
