Thank you for following today's live blog coverage of the fire. 

The blog is now closing for the evening. 

New World Victoria Park is praising the work of everyone involved in today's devastating fire.

“We want to thank our team and customers for their response following the fire that broke out in store earlier today,” a post on the store's Facebook page said.

The store also reserved special praise for the quick work done by Fire and Emergency New Zealand to contain the fire.

“Right now, our focus is on supporting our people and the emergency response, including assessing damage to the store once it’s safe to do so.

“It’s early days and we’re still working through what it will take to get the store back on its feet for customers."

Traffic is snarled around central Auckland as people make their way home this evening. 
Those heading out of main streets say traffic is bumper to bumper with vehicles hardly moving. 

The badly-damaged grocery store was considered an important location to the Foodstuffs supermarket chain. 

"It's a very important location to us. 

" I don't really know what the plan to get back to trading will be yet," said Quin.

"The first thing is we can't get safe access to the building till fire and emergency give that to us. Secondly, obviously a lot of water, a lot of smoke, a lot of carcinogens have gone through the building. 

 "It's probably extensively damaged."

"There's been an extensive refurbishment of the store to bring a fantastic new look and feel to this community. We want to get back to being able to do that as fast as we can."

Quin described hearing word of the fire was "a shock". 

"You hear that there's a fire at a store, you start hoping it's a very small thing that's been handled. This clearly wasn't."

Those who left cars in the carpark beneath the burning store had started being reunited with their stranded vehicles. 

"Cars have been moved out as it's been safe. I think we're nearly there in terms of reuniting people with their cars," Quin said. 

While there might be smoke around but at this stage they haven't had any reports of damage to cars.

Quin said they know the area in which the fire started, but didn't know the cause of blaze at this stage.

"It seems like it's been a pretty significant event, based on watching it unfold during the day and the fact that it took several hours, but we don't have any accurate assessment at this point."

They needed to wait for the fire service to make the building safe to start entering and inspecting.

The value of stock loss was still unknown at this time with the owners still waiting on an accurate report of the damage.

Quin said today the world of the store's managers had changed dramatically this morning. 
"It's obviously been an incredibly challenging day here today for the team and for everyone around associated with this event.  

"Firstly, I want to say how grateful we are that everybody is safe, the team, the customers, all of the builders that were on site, and incredibly proud of our store team who did an incredible job of calmly getting everyone safely out of the building while the event was unfolding."
The store was undergoing renovations when fire broke out. 

 Foodstuff's North Island chief executive Chris Quin says the fire broke out in a part of the store that was currently being rebuilt.
He said was incredibly proud of store team and incredibly grateful for the work of firefighters today. 
He described the fire as a "significant event" as he watched it unfold across the afternoon. 

"It's a significant event, there's a lot we don't know yet about the future, but we're just so glad right now people are safe."

Firefighters are finally able to access the interior of the burning  New World Victoria Park fire.

Fire Service controller Shaun Thornton said the fire was now contained and operations would continue overnight to extinguish it.

"Crews have been able to access inside the building, which has helped us get the fire contained," he said. 

There were 15 trucks and support vehicles at the scene.  Two of those were aerial trucks, with the Hamilton aerial now returning to its station in the Waikato.
The smoke had reduced considerably, and the Stay Inside Emergency Mobile Alert had been lifted.

"Road closures remain in place, please continue to avoid the area," said Thornton.

"We are making progress removing cars from the carpark. 

"If customers have a car in the New World carpark they are advised to see the Fire and Emergency New Zealand personnel at the cordon at the bottom end of Franklin Rd who are coordinating the retrieval of vehicles."