Fire Down Below
There is fire up aloft, there is fire down below
There’s fire in the galley, the cook he didn’t know.
Fire, fire, fire down below,
Let’s fetch a bucket of water, boys, there’s fire down below.
When I drove back home last night around 11 (midnight, if you take into account of what Daylight Savings time makes it feel like) things went pretty ridiculously wrong. I drove behind about three firetrucks heading towards a pillar of smoke reaching out towards the heavens at about where I live. That’s a problem. The good news is that my apartment was not on fire; the bad news is that what I suspected was true: the Putney General Store was on fire. Again.
The Putney General Store got hit by an electrical fire about a year and a half ago. Most of it had sprinkler systems install so only the third floor caught on fire. It was pretty quickly put out and the building was in decent shape despite not being actually usable as a store anymore. Being a historical landmark folks raised over $200,000 to try to rebuild it. Last night, at the point when it was almost ready to reopen, it caught fire again.
Investigators are saying that it’s probably arson. I mean, it really doesn’t take that much to figure out it’s probably intentional. First of all, there’s pretty much nothing inside this empty building that could start a fire. In general empty houses do not instantaneously turn into roaring infernos; especially after a day of rain. The fire also spread very, very quickly through the building and wood just doesn’t burn that fast on its own—the fire was seen three miles away and I could see the smoke from over ten miles away. Sadly, pretty much everything was destroyed in the fire so investigating at the scene will be hard.
Nobody was actually hurt in the fire. However, every single goddamn thing in this little New England town is made of wood. The fire could have easily spread to all the residential houses around the store—it did do quite a bit of damage to another commercial building—and then to the woods behind those houses are the entire county would have been on fire. Over a hundred firefighters from VT and NH was there which means that pretty much it took everything the local fire department could summon to contain this fire. That also meant that a very large surrounding area was understaffed for firefighting last night. The firefighters were amazing, though. Despite the fire being pretty much an unreasonable inferno they were in fact able to contain it.
Unlike most people who actually lived here for more than a few years I don’t have many fond memories of the place. I never really shopped there and it was more a landmark than anything else. What I’m more concerned with is that there’s a strong possibility that someone went and endangered the entire town for some unknown reason; usually when a store burns down it’s because of organized crime or insurance fraud but both those reasons do not apply here. I mean, if this was arson this would have been completely stupid and had absolutely no purpose besides causing grief and wasting both historical society and taxpayer money (oh, and causing extensive property damage to nearby buildings).
I’ve actually never seen this many sirens in my entire life. This includes the time when someone threw a grenade at a cop across the street. Driving into town was surreal. The entire area was cut off by fire department vehicles and so I (and the Guildford fire engine) had to take a detour. Well. What else was there to do driving home on a twisted dirt road with a pillar of bright smoke rising behind me besides singing Fire Down Below?
Wing :: Nov.02.2009 :: Posts :: 1 Comment »
