Updated at 9:44 p.m.
MONTPELIER — Firefighters battled a massive fire Wednesday night that engulfed a lumberyard in the capital’s downtown.
The lumberyard of rk MILES, located on Stone Cutters Way near the Hunger Mountain Co-op, was visibly engulfed in fire and ash shortly after 7 p.m. as emergency personnel from the city and nearby towns responded.
No injuries were reported, according to deputy Montpelier fire chief James Quinn. He said the first fire truck on scene was destroyed by fire.
The firefighters on that engine came upon a “massive amount of fire already spreading throughout the lumberyard,” and “as they were trying to extricate some people, the fire kind of overwhelmed them and they had to get out,” Quinn said in an interview at the scene around 7:40 p.m.
He said the fire was “generally” controlled at the time of the interview, though he expected crews would be “working on fully extinguishing it through the next couple of days.”
Quinn said the Co-op building and rk MILES’ retail building had been saved, though a post on the City of Montpelier’s Facebook page said the “entire RK Miles building … will be a total loss.”
“Efforts are going into protecting the neighboring buildings – the Clothespin Factory and the Hunger Mountain Coop,” said the 8:09 p.m. update.
Heavy smoke at the scene limited visibility and turned the city sky red.
Earlier, as he watched crews battle the blaze, rk MILES store manager Jeff Knotek said he was first called about the fire at 6:18 p.m. He said he “didn’t believe the call when I got it” and “everything was on fire” when he arrived a short time later.
“Nobody’s hurt, that’s the main thing,” Knotek said. “Nobody was in the building, nobody was on the property.”
He didn’t know what had started the blaze, he said, and was waiting to hear more from authorities.
He said the destroyed lumberyard included a horseshoe-shaped ring of sheds, which stored goods such as lumber, insulation and sheet rock.
Stone Cutters Way, Granite Street and Barre Street were closed to traffic as of 6:46 p.m. due to the fire, according to a Facebook post by the Montpelier Police Department.
The Montpelier lumberyard is one of 10 owned by rk MILES, according to the company’s website.
Quinn said the fire department requested a temporary power shutoff from Green Mountain Power. That led to a peak of about 1,450 customers without power in the city at the fire’s outset, according to Green Mountain Power’s outage center.
Almost all had been restored by 8 p.m.
Wednesday’s fire was the second in days to strike Montpelier’s downtown. Another blaze late Saturday night caused significant damage to The Mad Taco restaurant on Main Street and the adjacent Charlie-O’s watering hole, as well as apartments upstairs.
That fire struck barely a week after The Mad Taco reopened following the floods that inundated the capital’s downtown in July.
