Firefighters battle Chelsea blaze in subzero temps
Toolbox
By David Delcore Staff Writer - Published: January 18, 2009
CHELSEA – A space heater that was apparently being used to keep pipes from freezing is being blamed for a Friday night fire that destroyed a historic building located in the heart of downtown Chelsea.
By Saturday morning, Assistant Fire Chief Alan Ackerman said only the smoldering shell of the three-story wood clapboard building that was once the local Grange hall and had last housed a Laundromat and a pizza parlor remained.
"The front of the building is pretty well gone and the second and third floors collapsed," Ackerman said even as firefighters were scrambling to line up a contractor to finish what the fire started.
Late Saturday afternoon, Gary Thrasher, an excavator from nearby Vershire, was reportedly on the scene to topple three exterior walls that survived the fire. One of those walls was connected to a garage owned by a neighboring property owner and another stood about 20 feet away from the nearby Mascoma Savings Bank. Neither of those structures was damaged, according to Ackerman.
After consulting with a state investigator, Ackerman said the fire appears to have started in the basement of the mostly vacant building where a space heater was being used to keep the pipes from freezing.
"That's what it looks like," he said.
According to Ackerman, occupants of two second-floor apartments escaped without injury as firefighters were summoned to the scene shortly before 8 p.m. Friday.
However, Ackerman said it quickly became evident that saving the building would not be possible and an "interior attack" was abandoned after about 30 minutes.
"It got ahead of us," he said of the basement fire, which spread in the walls of the building – jumping to the second and third floors while undermining the first floor.
As a result, Ackerman said, Chelsea volunteers, who were joined at the scene by firefighters from Washington, Williamstown, Vershire, Tunbridge, Barre, Barre Town, Berlin and Brookfield, shifted into "defensive mode" in hopes of keeping the fire from spreading.
Ackerman said those efforts were hampered by 20-below temperatures that froze hoses and pumps, turned a section of Route 110 into a skating rink and required nearly 60 firefighters several trucks to be deployed on a rotating basis.
"We had to send them back to the fire station to thaw out," he said of both the manpower and equipment.
At one point, Ackerman said, there was eight inches of ice built up on Route 110 as water used to try to extinguish the fire froze solid.
"It was quite a mess," he said, explaining traffic was detoured around that section of Chelsea's Main Street until 4 a.m. Saturday.
Ackerman said the fire knocked out power to roughly 50 village properties between 8 p.m. an midnight – resulting in a chilly night for several residents.
According to Ackerman, firefighters were able to contact the building's owner, Louis Weintraub, at his home in Florida and make arrangements for the demolition.
The historic building, which was home to a local hardware store for many years, was later acquired and renovated for use as a Grange Hall in the 1950s. The Grange sold the building in 1984 and a parade of businesses including a Laundromat, pizza shop and video store have come and gone since. The ground floor commercial space has been vacant in recent years.
42