Leesburg Station Auto Wash Rebuilds After Fire

Firefighters fought the blaze at the Leesburg Station Auto Wash on Leesburg’s Catoctin Circle for several hours. “They did a great job and [helped us] save our second building,” said co-owner Ryan Magazzine.

The facility consisted of two buildings: the main building that burned, where cleaning and detailing was performed, and the 165-foot long wash tunnel on the back of the property, which was not damaged.

“We still don’t know what happened,” Tom Magazzine said. “We know it was an electrical fire, but [that’s it].”

The building resembled a Victorian-era train station and won numerous business and architectural awards.

"It was really a very well-designed building," Leesburg town spokeswoman Kathleen R. Leidich told the Washington Post.

“It’s frustrating,” Ryan Magazzine joked. “We build this relatively new, clean building and it burns down. Then you see a 20-, 30-, 40-year-old building with wires hanging down, and the thing just can’t burn down.”

The night of the fire, the Magazzines were alerted and then watched their business facility melt away. They returned home that night together, and didn’t get a wink of sleep. They had plans to make.

“After we got over the initial shock, we had to figure out what to do about our 50 [employees],” Tom Magazzine said. “A building we can deal with, but the hardest thing–and the first real issue–is that so many people counted on us for their employment. We couldn’t offer jobs for all those people then, even though we planned to rebuild, and that was very hard.”

The Magazzine’s figured out a solution. First, they began building a new facility—one with an almost identical design to their award-winning original.

“The building worked for us very well, Tom Magazzine said. “The only changes we’re making are cosmetic.”

They secured the money from their insurance company (the fire claimed nearly $2 million in damages) and delved into the rebuilding process—something that sparked a little déjà vu for the Magazzines.

“I was saying, we just did this five years ago didn’t we?” Tom Magazzine said. “Why are we doing this again?”

Luckily, while the fire destroyed the building’s walls and roof, it didn’t damage the foundation—savings months of the reconstruction.

Once they began the restoration of the facility, the Magazzines had to figure out how to keep the core of their staff together.

“Many of our employees had been with us for more than four years—they had been trained to be the best [in their industry],” Tom Magazzine said.

They quickly got to work to find a way to stay in business while the rebuilding was underway.

“A number of people in town knew we were looking for a temporary facility, “Tom Magazzine said. “Our real estate agent found us this place [behind the Suzuki dealership on 610 E Market Street] in the morning, and I believe we signed on it that afternoon.”

The Magazzine family was back on the washing and detailing scene. “We were able to bring back about 25 employees and all of our managers,” Tom Magazzine said.

But their temporary location in a garage-like facility attached to the Suzuki dealership cut down the Auto Wash production. “We can’t make money doing this,” Tom Magazzine said. “We went from doing 110, 120 cars an hour to maybe 10. It certainly makes the days go by a lot slower.”

But the point isn’t to make money. The Magazzines have managed to keep a core of their staff, and once their new facility is ready in 60-90 days, they hope to bring back everyone that they couldn’t employ before.

The Maggazzines were also able to keep some employees by having them perform odd jobs rebuilding their structure. They also used the opportunity to do maintenance work to the car wash tunnel and the building that housed it—fixes and altercations that would have been difficult with the facility in a fully operational state.

Despite not knowing exactly how the electrical fire started, the Magazzines are striving to ensure it does not happen again.

“It’s one of those things that you think will never happen to you—until it does,” they said. The new building uses fire retardant wood, fireproof roof paneling, and a sprinkler system throughout the facility, even though building codes don’t require those additions.

But the Magazzines are worried about another issue—potentially losing their customer base.

“We were afraid our customers would go somewhere else,” Tom Magazzine said. “But we have a reputation of quality—we don’t half-clean cars. There’s no such thing as ‘quick and dirty.’ If we’re going to clean the car, we really need to clean the car well.”

The Magazzines received interesting feedback once customers went elsewhere after the fire. Customers contacted them, begging them to hurry up the rebuilding process—they never realized how much they appreciated all the small details that the Magazzine’s took care of, such as thoroughly cleaning the cup holders and not just wiping down the floor mats.

“We are confident that our customers are coming back,” Ryan Magazzine said. “And we will maintain the standards that we had before, if not improve on them.”

The Magazzines appreciate the community support they received throughout the ordeal, expressed in hundreds of letters and phone calls.

The Leesburg Station Auto Wash will be back and shooting cars through in no time—rebuilt from out of the ashes.