1/2 Arno can’t do much with his wine anymore (photo: Imke van de Laar).
The fire that destroyed the thrift shop on Industrieweg in Best on Sunday evening also has major consequences for other entrepreneurs in the same business complex. Like wine merchant Arno Aartsen of Prowines. With him, the damage runs into the many tens of thousands of euros.
“We are a wine wholesaler. We mainly supply to the hospitality industry,” Arno says the morning after the fire. “We have between 12,000 and 15,000 bottles here. About six hundred different ones. Including more expensive Bordeaux wines and the best rosé in the world. There is a price tag attached to that… We can no longer sell them all.”
“Buying a fancy bottle of wine that stinks of smoke… you don’t want that, of course.”
He points: “All those boxes smell of smoke, the bottles too. If you buy a fancy bottle of wine and it smells like smoke… you don’t want that, of course. We don’t want to sell it either, it’s that simple.” High temperatures are harmful to the wine, he explains. “We won’t be able to sell the wines that are here now in the coming weeks anyway. Probably not at all. Such a closed box might still be possible. But a bottle full of soot, we can’t do anything with that anymore.” Arno therefore speaks of a ‘proper noose’.
“It was so toxic inside, you’d fall over in five minutes.”
Arno heard about the fire around half past six in the evening when he received a call from an entrepreneur in the street. “There is a building between the thrift store and my business. It will all be okay, I thought. But the smoke has traveled through the whole building.”
When he arrived, he saw an awful lot of fire trucks, emergency services and a lot of smoke. “That’s wrong,” he realized immediately. “Sunday evening we were updated and we heard how wrong it was. We were not allowed to enter the building then. It was so toxic that if you were inside for five minutes, you would fall over, so to speak.”
“Everything has to get out of here now. All wines, all positions…”
The coming days will be all about cleaning his business for the entrepreneur. “Everything has to get out of here now. All wines, all racks… Only then can the cleaning crew get to work here. But my customers also have to move on, they need wine. Our first task is therefore to find space where new deliveries can be received to help our customers from there.”
An 18-year-old man from Best has been arrested in connection with the fire. The cause of the fire is under investigation. Just like the role that the 18-year-old man would have played in this.
READ ALSO: Very large fire with a lot of smoke at a thrift store in Best