Gas Can Fire Started Near
Randolph Municipal Building
By Sandy Cooch

How would you feel if someone ignited a gas can outside your place of work, during daylight hours?

"It was unsettling; it was really unsettling," Randolph Town Clerk Joyce Mazzucco said yesterday afternoon, a few hours after she extinguished a a burning "object" on the Summer Street side of the brick municipal building. Examination of the blackened remnant afterwards revealed that it had been a small, red plastic gasoline container, she said.

It was an odd occurrence, and potentially a very dangerous one, as the two propane tanks that serve the municipal building are sited just around the corner from the blaze. Happily, it appears that the container didn’t have much gasoline in it at the time it was lit.

Mazzucco said she was alerted at 11:45 a.m. yesterday, by Atty. Patricia Meyer, who has offices nearby on Summer Street. A client, who had just entered Meyer’s office, told her about the fire.

Mazzucco ran out to find a small blaze, about 15 feet away from the building. Flames were starting to singe the lower branches of one of the large evergreen bushes that line the west side of the building.

"It had been burning for just a few minutes," she said.

She dashed back inside, alerted her fellow employees, and went back out with a fire extinguisher. It didn’t take long put out the flames, and once the fire was out, Mazzucco said, she could smell gasoline.

Randolph Police Chief Jim Krakowiecki this week put out an appeal for information on the blaze, which was set in the middle of the day.

"It was strange that it was under a tree by the town hall," the chief said, in a reference to recent controversy over a different tree—a crabapple—that is also on muncipal building grounds. Last week the selectboard affirmed its earlier decision that the tree could be removed for possible expansion of the municipal building.

"If anyone has any information, it would definitely be appreciated," the chief said. "Even if it was only a prank, it could have been a deadly prank."

Krakowiecki promised that any information received would remain "strictly confidential." The RPD number is 728-3737.