We’re fundraising to support the newsroom this spring. But on this page let’s take a break. Here are some efforts raising funds to support victims of the Searsmont fire. We hope you’ll consider a gift to support the families.
James Ames was directly underneath the silo when it blew.
The hulking black cylinder, filled with burning wood shavings, loomed over the chief of Searsmont’s volunteer fire department, whose hair had turned white during his long tenure in the role, and the other volunteers. Trained to the same standards as professionals, they all have jobs and kids and lives but dropped whatever they happened to be doing the morning of May 15 to rush to Robbins Lumber mill in Searsmont, which would soon become the scene of Maine’s worst industrial disaster in years.
The mill is familiar to many local firefighters, who have trained using the yard’s extensive firefighting systems, including two ponds, pumps and house hookups. But the firefight went from bad to worse when the five-story silo suddenly exploded without warning, shooting up in the air before crashing down into a warehouse filled with some 5 million board feet of lumber, ready for delivery.
“It just friggin’ blew that silo, tipped it over. It blew me 15 feet right through the air,” Ames said shortly afterward, covered in soot and debris and planted in a truck that belongs to his daughter, a safety coordinator at the mill, who had given him orders not to move until he could get checked out. “Some guys dragged me out. And I have no idea who’s hurt or anything.”
Not far away, Prent Marriner, the fire chief of neighboring Appleton, had stepped back from the fire and briefly removed his mask and gloves while conferring with another firefighter when he “turned and saw the fireball.” He suffered second-degree burns to his hands and first-degree burns to his face, and Appleton’s 2008 International Ferrara pumper-tanker was destroyed.
“It was like a horizontal band of fire in all directions. People were flying and on fire,” Marriner said. “We couldn’t outrun the fire.”
The fire and ensuing explosion at the saw mill rocked the small town of about 1,000, where everybody knows somebody who works at the mill, and reverberated outward to neighboring towns and even counties as the entire region joined the fight.
Andrew Cross, a 27-year-old volunteer firefighter from Morrill, was found dead at the scene, most likely killed in the blast, and 12 others were wounded, some seriously enough to be evacuated to burn units in Boston. At least three firetrucks were destroyed. And one of Waldo County’s biggest employers and economic engines was taken offline indefinitely.
Three members of the Robbins family, who have owned the mill for generations and are often upheld as model local business owners, were among those injured. Some people were burned so severely that they could not be immediately recognized. “It was just chaos everywhere,” said a Robbins employee who was interviewed later at the emergency room in Belfast.
The cause of the fire and explosion is currently under investigation by the Maine fire marshal’s office and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, whose experts have spent days on the scene trying to understand what happened.
According to first-hand accounts, the fire started in the section of the mill where wood shavings, stored in the silo, are bagged for retail sale. It’s not far from the fuel depot for the mill’s vehicle fleet. Given the ever-present fire hazard at a sawmill, the sprawling complex has in-house firefighting systems and trained employees. Millworkers began attacking the blaze before calling for backup from the fire department, which soon joined the fight and called in mutual aid from neighboring towns. At some point, the fire spread to the nearby warehouse and then, without warning, the silo exploded, shooting up and toppling over in a massive fireball.
Radio traffic from the moment after the blast captures the alarm in the voices of the firefighters on the scene, who nonetheless maintained professional composure while trying to convey the sheer scale of the emergency to dispatchers. “There’s been a huge explosion,” the first firefighter reported to alert dispatch. “Multiple firefighters injured and burning. We need more help here now immediately!”
First two ambulances were dispatched, then three, then seven. “We need more,” the firefighter said. “Multiple firetrucks are burning.”
After being told by a dispatcher that two LifeFlight helicopters were being sent to stage at a hospital, another firefighter responded: “LifeFlight to the scene, please.”
Scott Dudley, a 45-year Robbins Lumber employee who drives a forklift, lives across the street from the facility’s Robbins Mill Road entrance. He had not gone into work Friday morning, but had heard the explosion from his house and was trying to figure out what happened. Following the blast, he stood at the entrance to the mill, holding a cellphone to try to glean information while staring up at a colossal plume of black smoke.
“I heard an explosion,” he said in the chaotic initial aftermath. “I didn’t know what it was. One of the office girls was sitting down here with a truck packed with flashers on, so I come over to see what’s going on.”
Fire trucks and ambulances arrived from as far away as Rockland, Thomaston, Troy and Union, along with units from Belfast, Rockport, Camden, Hope, Liberty, Morrill, Appleton, Unity and West Frankfort. Many of the departments, like Searsmont, are staffed fully by volunteers, though even departments with paid staff have volunteer responders, too. Helicopters circled. Tankers refilled directly from the St. George River, which runs behind the mill complex, and at a second site in central Searsmont, while firefighters continued to work to contain the blaze well into the night.
As departments across the state’s midcoast responded to the fire, others scrambled to cover the now emptied local fire stations. Mutual aid agreements among fire stations allow for this type of coverage during crises. In Camden, 88-year-old former fire chief Bob Oxton turned up in his bunker gear at the public safety building, which is named after him, to help hold down the fort.
Meanwhile, off-duty medical personnel raced to MaineHealth Pen Bay Hospital in Rockport and MaineHealth Waldo Hospital in Belfast to try to beat the steady stream of ambulances that soon began arriving with burn patients. Some were quickly loaded into other ambulances or helicopters and sent as far away as Portland, Augusta and Boston.
“We have three injured on our truck, including me,” one firefighter radioed while driving to Pen Bay.
At the Belfast hospital, where a helicopter could be seen landing on the roof, the daughter of a firefighter used a Midcoast Villager reporter’s cellphone to call someone, saying she did not know the status of her mother. Later, we learned that her mother, Katherine Paige of Belmont, was severely burned and intubated in an ICU, but is expected to recover, according to her husband, who is also a firefighter.
By the afternoon, there were kids to pick up at schools across the region, where anxious parents stood in clusters discussing the experiences of their spouses who had been at the fire or were still there. Outside Lincolnville Central School, where the acrid scent of the fire was impossible to ignore, one mother noted the town’s fire department “is all LCS dads.”
Down the road from the mill, the Fraternity Village General Store is typically filled with millworkers.
On Friday, as the kitchen was making extra pizzas and sandwiches to send down to emergency workers at the mill, people kept asking if there was a way they could give money to help those affected by the fire. So they put a jar out on the counter and started gathering donations, not knowing exactly what would be done with the money.
They’re kind of like family to us,” Amanda Boyington, who has co-owned the store for the past nine years, said of the Robbins employees.
It was reported from the field by John Blodgett, Daniel Dunkle, Drew Himmelstein and Lily Mott, with additional reporting by Stephen Betts, Jim Leonard, Alex Seitz-Wald and Willy Blackmore.
This story appears through a media partnership with Midcoast Villager.
