Borough officials don’t yet know the cause of last Monday’s fire that damaged vehicles and the maintenance shop.
Borough manager Steve Giesbrecht updated the borough assembly on the fire investigation during a meeting Thursday night.
“Staff is starting to go through the process of identifying what’s salvageable and what’s not,” he told the assembly. “We’ve had the state fire marshal, deputy here, they’re gone. We’ve got three people from the insurance company here doing their version of an investigation as well as taking pictures and stuff. We likely will not know cause before a period of time. Nobody wants to say it at this point but they’re going to go back and do their reports. Five vehicles were involved, varying degrees of damage, as well as the side of the building.”
Fire fighters initially suspected that the blaze started in a shed near the main shop building. There were tires stored in that shed that burned and exploded, filling the sky with thick black smoke Monday night. The shop building itself was also damaged. The borough expects to have a structural engineer along with a hazardous materials team visit this month to determine if the building can still be used or if it needs to be demolished.
The assembly thanked the volunteer fire fighters for responding to the blaze Monday night. The borough’s fire and EMS director Sandy Dixson noted it was a community effort.
“It starts with dispatch and they page us out and then the police officers show up and they helped evacuate people from nearby homes and then make sure that people don’t come into the scene,” Dixson told the assembly. “And they protected our large diameter supply hose so that somebody doesn’t run it over and we lose water supply. So I just want to make sure it’s kind of a community effort and a borough effort as well but the volunteers are doing it for free so keep that in mind.”
Dixson said volunteers fire fighters worked for hours after cleaning up and getting gear ready for the next call.
