R.J. Bentley’s has been closed since Thursday after a fire broke out around 4:30 a.m., causing $25,000 worth of damage to the popular bar and landing a volunteer College Park firefighter in the hospital.

The bar is predicted to reopen by the middle of this week, an employee said.

The Bentley’s fire was the third minor fire within 24 hours last week, following fires in an Indian restaurant and a laundromat on Route 1, Prince George’s County Fire Department spokesman Mark Brady said.

A county police officer patrolling the area called in the Bentley’s fire when he saw smoke Thursday morning while the building was unoccupied, Brady said. Seven local fire companies responded to the alert, using about 10 pieces of apparatus and about 35 firefighters and paramedics.

Fire investigators determined the fire was accidental and said they believe it began in the kitchen’s grill or stove. Afterwards, it rose through the ventilation system to the roof, Brady said. The ventilation hood on the roof failed to quell the fire when the air got too hot.

Firefighter Michael Schaefer said the fire was successfully extinguished within 10 minutes.  However, within the first two minutes of the firefighters’ arrival, former Capt. Ari Schloss fell from his ladder and was injured.

Schloss was climbing to the roof when the ladder slipped out from under him. According to Schaefer, who drove the fire engine, Schloss fell to the pavement, cushioning his fall with his left arm. As a result, Schloss shattered his wrist and suffered from a broken toe as well as facial fractures and lacerations.

Schloss received immediate medical attention from the police and paramedics in the area. After release from the hospital, he began his recovery at his parents’ house. Schaefer said Schloss’s doctors predicted a full recovery.

“He has a healing process ahead of him, but knowing him, he’ll be back,” volunteer fire Capt. Steve Kerber said.

Schaefer said he sometimes feels emotionally detached from the injured people he sees while fighting fires. However, he felt differently about Schloss.

“When it’s one of your own people, it really hits home,” he said.

“The possibility is always there,” Kerber said of Schloss’s injury. “We volunteer to do a very dangerous thing.”

No damage is visible to the storefront, but windows and ceiling tiles were broken and there was significant damage to the ventilation system, Kerber said.

The previous day, the department fought two separate, unrelated fires on Route 1, Kerber said. A neon sign in the front window of an Indian restaurant set off the first fire at approximately 4 a.m. Wednesday, and the second fire broke out only five hours later at Laundry World, a laundromat at the intersection of Route 1 and Guilford Road.

Kerber said the laundromat fire was the result of a malfunction in wiring, which resulted in a corner of the roof catching fire. The owner called in the fire as he was opening the store. Although there were people inside the building, no one was hurt, Kerber said.

Kerber said all three fires were accidental and unrelated. He described them as minor and said each was extinguished “relatively quickly” — within 10 minutes. However, firefighters stayed up to two hours more at each fire to make sure there were no embers left and that the fire had stopped spreading.

Although it is uncommon for so many fires to occur in a short period of time, Kerber said the firefighters were able to fight them smoothly.

“The guys got very tired, but we’re well trained,” he said. “Nothing caught us too off-guard.”

Senior staff writer Jeremy Hsieh contributed to this report.