Updated 5:47 p.m.
Fire crews were still at work Thursday morning using an excavator to lift up rubble to put out small hotspots at a Montpelier lumberyard that was destroyed in a massive fire the night before.
But even as officials and onlookers expressed dismay at yet another misfortune for Vermont’s capital, they also felt a measure of relief. Though the fire had been hot and fast enough to overtake the first fire truck on the scene and warp the vinyl siding of a neighboring, six-unit condo building, it was contained to the lumberyard.
Nobody was killed or injured in the blaze.
Indeed, after the smoke had cleared, even the showroom for rk MILES — the building materials company that owns the lumberyard on Stone Cutters Way — remained standing. Montpelier Fire Chief Robert Gowans said that while parts of that building’s exterior siding had charred and melted, there was no damage to the interior. Fire crews had the fire largely under control about four hours after first arriving at the scene, he said.
In a press release issued Thursday afternoon by the state Department of Public Safety and the Montpelier police and fire departments, officials said an initial investigation had “uncovered no evidence to indicate the blaze is suspicious.” The fire’s cause had not yet been determined and the investigation is ongoing, they said.
The Hunger Mountain Co-op, which directly abuts the lumberyard, also escaped essentially unscathed, although the store remained closed to the public on Thursday.
“There’s not enough words to describe how grateful we are to the first responders and firefighters,” said Stephani Kononan, the store’s community relations manager. “They definitely saved our building.”
Fire never reached the building, but it damaged the co-op’s phone and fiber lines, she said. Staff can’t start work again until phone service is restored. It’s unclear how long that will take at this point, Kononan said, although telephone company representatives are expected to visit the property later that day. Power has already been restored.
Wednesday night’s blaze followed another downtown fire that struck over the weekend, and it comes on the heels of this summer’s historic flooding, which wrecked central Vermont, including Montpelier’s downtown.
The building company has 10 locations spread between Vermont and Massachusetts, and three of its locations — in Barre, Morrisville, and Montpelier — were impacted by July’s floods. The capital city store reopened about two weeks after the floodwaters receded, but in Barre, it took far longer, rk MILES owner Joe Miles said Thursday.
“We just reopened in Barre. It took three months to reopen. So having the fire in Montpelier is a bit of a shock,” he said.
The company lost probably about $500,000 of inventory in the lumberyard fire, he said, although its losses are insured. For now, Montpelier employees will report out of Barre, Miles said, which is where the company delivers from anyway. Asked for what he thought the future held for the Montpelier location, Miles said he couldn’t yet say.
“We’ve just got to get down the road a little bit,” he said. Miles also said several times that he was deeply thankful that firefighters had been able to keep the blaze from spreading to neighboring homes and businesses.
City residents are “pretty discouraged by just the barrage of disasters” that have befallen the capital in recent months, Mayor Jack McCullough said Thursday. But they’re also deeply appreciative of the “great service” from the city’s public employees, as well as the “amazing response” from neighboring fire departments.
“This could have been much, much worse,” he said. “To have no loss of life, no injuries. No spread to the adjoining properties, to not even lose the main building of rk MILES is really the best we could possibly hope for.”
He even expressed surprise that the city had not even experienced a water main break during the incident.
Rep. Conor Casey, D-Montpelier, echoed McCullough. There’s “an air of melancholy across the town,” he said, adding that it was nevertheless “amazing” that first responders had been able to contain the fire given that the area was “a powder keg.”
“There’s relief there, but there’s also just kind of a sense of like, you know, this is a punch in the gut,” he said. “It’s like: what’s next?
