State officials are investigating the cause of a blaze that destroyed a waterfront building in Lubec on Tuesday, according to the local fire chief.
Robert Hood, head of Lubec’s Fire Department, said that the cause of the blaze has not been determined. The building that caught fire at 17 Johnson St. is a total loss, he said.
The building is located directly next to the town boat ramp and a parking lot that overlooks the local harbor and Johnson Bay. A crowd of onlookers came to the waterfront Tuesday afternoon as the fire grew, sending large flames through the roof and plumes of smoke into the sky.
Hood said that no one was injured in the blaze, which was first reported about 1:20 p.m. Tuesday. No one was in the building, but a passer-by noticed smoke rising from the roof, he said.
Aside from the building, there was equipment inside that also was destroyed, he said. The fire consumed a forklift and empty lobster tanks, along with restaurant equipment from when the building housed a lobster takeout business a few years ago.
“The equipment and everything was still there,” Hood said.
The building was insured.
Fourteen firefighters from Lubec and eight more from Campobello, the neighboring Canadian island connected to downtown by a bridge, extinguished the flames and were at the site of the fire until 8 p.m., Hood said.
The building, like many others on Lubec’s waterfront, for decades was owned by a series of fishing and seafood businesses before becoming mostly idle in recent years.
Other local waterfront buildings have been lost in the past decade to decay or other calamities. One of them, a former sardine brining shed, made international news in 2018 when a winter storm pulled it off its posts and floated it across the Canadian border to Campobello.
