NATIONAL CITY, Calif. (KGTV) – A broken gas line led to a fire at a construction site on the Westfield Plaza Bonita shopping mall property early Wednesday morning.
National City Fire Department officials said construction crews were working on a project in the parking lot near the Round 1 Arcade and Nordstrom Rack at around 2:50 a.m. when a construction vehicle dug up a gas line considered to be one of the largest lines at the mall.
NCFD officials believe heat from the vehicle ignited the line and caused a fire with flames shooting several feet into the air.
Flames engulfed at least one construction vehicle; no injuries were reported and there was no damage to the mall structure.
Employees who happened to be at the mall at the time of the incident were told to evacuate.
At roughly 9:45 a.m., the fire — isolated to just the construction site — was put out.
Officials asked the public to stay away from the mall property for several hours. Mall employees were also told the shopping center was shut down until fire officials confirmed it was safe to reopen.
Vanessa Leeper, a store manager at the mall’s Shoe Palace store, said, "One of my employees, I guess she saw it on the news and she let me know. I went ahead and looked it up and sure enough I saw it on the news that this was going on."
Leeper told her employees to stay home and not to come to work until she had an update on the situation and safety of their jobsite.
Leeper said of the fire’s location, "I mean, I've seen that right there where the Nordstrom is. They've been working on that, I want to say, for about a year now."
San Diego Gas & Electric officials said at least 800 business and residential customers in the area have been impacted by the line break and fire.
