Cigarette tossed into mulch blamed for fire Sunday at Havertown pub

A cigarette carelessly tossed into mulch is being blamed for the raging fire that consumed the deck at Barnaby's Restaurant & Pub in Havertown.

The fire outside the West Chester Pike eatery was reported about 5:25 a.m. Sunday and quickly went to a second alarm, said Police Chief John Viola of Haverford Township.

Five Haverford fire companies, along with companies from nearby Springfield and Marple Townships and Narberth Ambulance, responded to the fire.

"By the time the first call came in, it was a heavy volume of fire," said Viola, who said a cigarette probably caused the blaze. "It smouldered and caught on the deck and went from there."

Viola said restaurant employees had recently put out a few small smouldering mulch fires caused by cigarettes. A staff member reported that they smelled "something burning" about 11 p.m. but a search turned up nothing. The last staff member left the location about 2:30 a.m., he said.

"When you put it all together, it leads to a discarded cigarette," Viola said.

The deck was demolished in the fire and the interior of the restaurant sustained heavy smoke and water damage, but the building was "absolutely not a total loss," Viola said. There was about 18 inches of water in the basement and about two to three inches on the first floor, he added.

"The sprinkler probably saved the building itself," he said. "It ran for a good hour to an hour and a half."

No injuries were reported. Three cars left overnight in the middle of the parking lot had parts that were melted from the heat, he said.

Viola said the area was originally the site of a saw mill. A hotel, appropriately named the Saw Mill Inn, was located there for a while, he said.

Mulch fires outside restaurants are not uncommon, Viola said. "In the summertime, we get a lot of them."

In January, officials in Lower Macungie Township in Lehigh County voted to ban flammable materials such as bark mulch, wood chips or other wood products from parking lot landscaping after a series of fires, the Allentown Morning Call reported.

In 2012, Massachusetts banned wood landscaping mulch within 18 inches of the base of wood- or vinyl-sided buildings, CBS reported.

In 2007, a cigarette tossed onto a mulch pile outside a Chili's Grill & Bar in Cherry Hill was the cause of a fire that demolished it and an adjoining eatery.