Fire causes $4.25M in damages to custom van biz

A three-alarm fire at Roanoke‘s Riverdale campus on Saturday started accidentally from an electrical cause, Roanoke Fire-EMS Chief David Hoback said Wednesday.

Damages from the fire that reduced Noke Van Co., a custom camper van business, to rubble are estimated at $4.25 million.

“Once you have a structural collapse and a roof collapse, sometimes we can’t get to the fire that’s underneath all that debris,” Hoback said. “That’s why we brought in an excavator to come in and move that debris so that we could put the fire out.”

Justin vanBlaricom, the company’s co-founder and CEO, checked his security camera after getting a call from a friend who’d heard there was a fire in Southeast Roanoke. It was his building.

“By the time I got there, the fire department was already there, and it was fully engulfed, and there was nothing that could be saved,” he said.

The building was one of several structures located at the former campus of American Viscose, a rayon plant that closed in the 1950s. A $50 million-plus effort, spearheaded by developer Ed Walker, to redevelop the 126-acre property into a community filled with apartments, shops, eateries and businesses has been in the works since 2023.

Walker called the fire “a setback” and said it was “deeply heartbreaking” for Noke Van to go through this and to lose one of the campus’s great buildings. He does not expect it to lead to cost overruns or to delay any projects at Riverdale.

“We’re just turning all of our energy toward supporting Noke Vans,” he said.

Chris’s Custard and Coffee Shop,  an eatery near the campus that’s also connected to a workforce training program for individuals with intellectual, developmental and physical disabilities, lost a food truck in the fire. Johnson Orthodontics made a matching gift of up to $20,000 to buy a new truck, according to a Monday Facebook post.

On Wednesday afternoon, Noke Van Co. announced plans to relocate to 1009 Riverdale Ave. on the Riverdale campus.

“It’s a great flexible space, and we are grateful to work together with Riverdale, our customers and our partners to build something beautiful out of the ashes,” Josh Yerton, the company’s chief design officer and product engineer, wrote in a text.

The Noke Van Co. lost 22 vehicles along with specialty equipment and tools in the fire, according to Yerton.

“There’s nothing left,” vanBlaricom said. “It’s just bricks.”

Of the company’s 20 employees, about half are fulltime. A GoFundMe campaign had raised $33,267 by Wednesday afternoon. The entirety of that money will go to covering employee paychecks, according to vanBlaricom.

“We want to take care of our employees above anything else,” he said.

The owners of Noke Van Co. aren’t calling it a day on the business either, vanBlaricom and Yerton stressed. “My 12-year-old, when he found out this whole thing had happened, he said, ‘Well, Dad, now you can do it again because you’ve already done it once,’” Yerton said.

Founded in 2022, Noke Van Co., moved to the Riverdale property about a year and a half ago.

Since purchasing the Riverdale campus, workers have carted away at least 4 million pounds of debris, including multiple abandoned vehicles that were left behind by numerous tenants who inhabited the complex in the decades after the plant closed, according to Walker.

“If this had happened two years ago, the fire trucks couldn’t have gotten to the fire,” Walker said.

Developers will break ground on a 267-unit apartment building on the Riverdale campus in the fall. That project is led by Walker and developers Joe Thompson and Tommy Spellman.