New Jersey couple’s wedding is RUINED after a fire broke out at their ceremony venue

A New Jersey couple’s wedding was ruined after a fire broke out at their ceremony venue less than an hour before they were to tie the knot, leaving their florist in tears. 

Yomaris Coromina of Diva Blooms, a floral and event design company, documented the fire at The Rockleigh in Bergan County in a video shared on Instagram amid the commotion on Thursday.  

‘Today was just the most perfect day. We did a beautiful setup at The Rockleigh in New Jersey, and then I started walking to the ceremony area to just put out petals, and I started smelling smoke,’ she explained. ‘Lo and behold, the venue’s on fire and they’re canceling the wedding.’ 

The Rockleigh sits on 12 acres, and while the reception location itself wasn’t in flames, the room was filled with smoke. 

Coromina panned the camera to the inside to show the stunning floral centerpieces she and her team spent all day working on. 

‘This is the beautiful work that we did,’ she said, adding: ‘All my inventory’s in here. It smells like pure smoke. It smells terrible, like all the smoke is coming in. There are fire trucks everywhere, paramedics. There are police officers.’

She started to cry as she recounted how she had been up since 4 a.m., and her team had been ‘working nonstop on this event.’ 

‘I feel terrible for the bride,’ she said. ‘It’s just getting worse and worse. I just want to cry. This is so bad. Like there is smoke everywhere.’

‘I haven’t even gone to see the bride, but I am sure she’s devastated,’ she added.

Coromina explained that she was hearing ‘a lot of glass breaking’ as firefighters worked to put out the blaze. 

‘This is the stuff you see in movies. You don’t see this in real life,’ she said. ‘My nicest event. We didn’t even get pictures. I’m so upset.’ 

She admitted that she tried to run in and grab the centerpieces that she had rented for the event, but police officers stopped her. 

‘Something I could have never imagined happened today… the venue we were setting up caught fire on a beautiful wedding day… I feel so bad for my client,’ she wrote in the caption. 

‘I cannot imagine what they are going through. Our team worked so hard on this event to make sure it was perfect for them. I was so nervous with everything going on that everything seemed like an eternity. Thank God no one was hurt and the fire was put out within 30 [minutes] otherwise, it would have been a lot worse.’

The blaze at The Rockleigh broke out just before 6 p.m., NBC New York reported. 

The fire started in a boiler and quickly spread to the second floor, according to the Northvale Police Department, but everyone was able to get out of the building safely. 

In a follow-up video, Coromina announced that the ceremony was back on after they moved the event outside, but the unnamed couple ultimately decided to postpone their wedding. 

On her Instagram Stories, she posted footage of the stunning décor and members of the bridal party posing for pictures before the fire broke out. 

‘And then this happens,’ she wrote of the fire. 

Coromina and her team worked tirelessly to move the ceremony location, and her videos showed staffers picking up flower petals off of the ground.

She threw on a mask and ran into the reception location to grab all of the centerpieces from the smoke-filled room. 

‘Those couple of seconds were not good for my lungs!’ she said. 

As guests milled around in the parking lot, they moved the floral centerpieces to a different location outside. Everything was set up and ready to go when they found out the ceremony had been postponed by the couple.  

‘Praying for my bride and her hubby, their family and friends that flew in/came out to experience this beautiful union,’ she wrote on her Instagram Stories. 

‘I’m happy no one was physically harmed by today’s fire, but saddened because today did not turn out as we planned.’