Reef Underground owner Matthew Dodd spent the night before the fire photographing newly arrived coral for customers.
Hours later, every pet fish in his Underwood shop was dead.
A suspicious fire in a neighbouring tenancy at the Logan Road complex cut power to Reef Underground on Thursday 30 July, filled the building with smoke and forced Mr Dodd into an emergency fight to save the business he had spent six years building.
“I’d just come back from a trip to Cairns and visited some suppliers of coral,” he said.
“It was a really good week and then [it] just absolutely turned around.”
Mr Dodd woke the next morning to messages from two people and found his security cameras would not connect.
“I knew something was wrong straight away,” he said.
At the shop, he found police outside and the neighbouring tenancy badly damaged.
“The whole front of that shop and inside was just black,” he said.
“It was still smouldering.”
Police allowed him limited access while the complex remained a crime scene.
Inside, his pet fish were dead but most of the coral was still alive.
“Within a couple of hours, I rented a generator and I had the main items of equipment running to keep the coral alive,” he said.
For the next two nights, he returned every five or six hours to refuel it.
When police released the crime scene, customers arrived to help move livestock, pack products and salvage the business.
“I can only be thankful for the great customers I have and the support they’ve given me,” he said.
His surviving coral is now being kept at a friend’s house, allowing Reef Underground to operate online at less than a third of its former capacity.
The shop is closed and its largest eight-foot coral tables cannot be salvaged, with replacements potentially taking up to 12 weeks.
“It will be rebuilding the shop from the beginning almost,” Mr Dodd said.
Mr Dodd spent years in the pet and aquarium industries before opening Reef Underground during COVID, withdrawing money from his superannuation to take the chance.
“I opened the shop and gave it a go, and it just turned over on itself and built into what it was over six years,” he said.
The business turned a lifelong fascination with the underwater world into a livelihood and allowed him to work towards producing much of Reef Underground’s coral himself.
Now, the future is uncertain.
“Now it’s sort of getting really depressing and demotivating seeing the shop each time I come,” he said.
“Just pulling out the devastation of it all and thinking of everything that’s packed into a garage, and the products and everything that’s squished into my friend’s house, and how we’re going to move forward from here.
“It is very, very hard to think about and deal with right now.”
Mr Dodd said break-ins, vandalism and previous incidents around the complex had already made him reluctant to work late.
“I used to work here all through the night sometimes packing orders,” he said.
“Now I don’t stay late … I don’t want to be here at 3am anymore when all the stuff seems to happen.”
He said the problems continued after the fire, when the complex was left without power and functioning alarms.
“People have been picking through the building very quickly, going through the wires,” he said.
“We’ve had people break into the fire escape. The neighbouring massage shop has been broken into now.”
Mr Dodd said only three of the complex’s six shops were occupied before the fire, while the massage business operator was now preparing to leave.
“Like me, she’s in a circumstance where she’s not sure where she’ll go from here,” he said.
Mr Dodd also criticised the response from those responsible for the property, saying neither the property manager nor real estate representative contacted him after the fire.
“We had no support from anyone that was involved in the building side of things,” he said.
Finding affordable replacement premises will be another challenge, although Mr Dodd said he would ideally remain in Logan.
Until then, customers can buy coral and products through Reef Underground’s website, with free local delivery.
Mr Dodd said the experience had highlighted the people left behind when the immediate attention surrounding fires disappears.
“You hear a lot about the fires and the thing that goes on with the shops that get burned down,” he said.
“But you don’t often think about who else is impacted by that who are totally innocent next door and close by.”
Residential units were also only metres from the complex.
“We’re just so lucky we’re on such a main road that so many people would have seen it quickly,” he said.
Now Reef Underground and the other affected businesses face the slower task of rebuilding after the headlines have moved on.
“We’ll all have to move on,” Mr Dodd said.
“We’ll have to pick up the pieces.”
Subscribe to stay up-to-date with news from across Logan. You’ll receive a link to our digital newspaper direct to your inbox each week. It’s free.
