Friday’s explosion and fire at the Robbins Lumber yard in Searsmont is the latest of multiple safety issues that have arisen at the property in recent years.
The blaze is at least the third fire at Robbins Lumber in the past decade. Another fire at the mill nearly 70 years ago burned the buildings to the ground.
And last year, the mill was fined by federal authorities for safety violations related to how employees shut down heavy machinery for maintenance.
It was not yet clear Friday afternoon what happened at the mill to cause Friday morning’s fire, which a mill official said spread from a wood shavings bagging plant to a silo, which then exploded. Officials have said there have been multiple people injured who have been transferred to hospitals across Maine, but details of how many people have been hurt and how serious the injuries are have not been released.
In 2025, the company was cited for failing to conduct a mandated annual or frequent inspection of their de-energizing procedures, according to the company’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration record.
The company was initially ordered to pay more than $10,000 for two violations, though they settled to pay about half that amount, according to an OSHA database.
Robbins Lumber says on its website that it is one of Waldo County’s largest employers with more than 115 employees. The company, which owns a lot of property in Searsmont, paid $96,000 in property tax to the town in 2025 for the 33-acre property where the mill is located, according to the town’s tax records. The property was assessed at a little more than $7.8 million that year.
In November 2024, a fire started in a control room for the sawmill’s dry kiln, though media reported at the time the fire did not spread to the nearby lumber storage sheds and no injuries were reported.
In 2019, two fires on the same day at the mill were caused by ash from a mill biomass plant piling too high in a storage area and burning the wooden walls around it, according to the Penobscot Bay Pilot.
Robbins Lumber began in 1881 when Frank and Otis Robbins opened a small stave mill on the St. George River, according to the company’s website. After the mill burned down in 1957, the Robbins family rebuilt the stave mill and added a sawmill.
Another explosion in Maine that injured multiple firefighters and killed another occurred in 2019 when a propane leak occurred at an office building in Farmington. That explosion killed a fire captain and injured six other members of the town’s fire department. The firefighters and surviving family members filed – and later settled – a civil lawsuit against C.N. Brown and Techno Metal Post of Maine, the companies that installed the building’s propane tank and bollards.
