Fire Destroys
Furniture Company
Building
By Martha Slater

A blaze which Randolph Village Fire Chief Jay Collette told The Herald was "termed suspicious and the cause undetermined," leveled a building formerly owned by the Ethan Allen furniture company on Salisbury St. in Randolph the morning of Friday, Dec. 21.

Julie Iffland of the Randolph Area Community Development Corp. (RACDC), which is the current owner of the site, said that plans had been in the works to demolish the building.

About 50 firefighters from the Randolph Village, Randolph Center, and East Randolph fire departments responded to the call, which came at about 7:45 a.m. White River Valley Ambulance personnel also responded, but no injuries were reported.

When he spoke with The Herald Friday afternoon, Collette said the fire site had been cleared at about 1 p.m. He said that the Vt. State Police and the state division of fire safety were working together to investigate it, but "based on the extent of the damage to the building, we may not ever know what caused it."

Collette added however, that, "It’s my understanding that the local police department has had quite a problem with break-ins there."

The building was located on property between School St. and Weston St., to the rear of the Day Funeral Home. Collette noted that, with no actual road access to the site and a lot of snow on the ground, "we had to get backhoes, bucket loaders and town plow trucks so we could get a road plowed out there big enough to get our equipment in, and so by the time we could get in there, the fire had breached the roof line."

A piece of equipment that was particularly valuable in this instance was the department’s tower truck, which was originally owned by the city of Burlington. Now emblazoned with the words "Randolph Center," one of the three separate fire divisions within the town of Randolph, it provided a way to put water on the fire from above.

Although the building was a total loss, Collette said the good news was that "none of our people got hurt and that’s something you always worry about with abandoned buildings."

Iffland said RACDC plans to keep and renovate a smaller building (commonly called the "bookkeeping building") which once housed the Ethan Allen offices on that site. She confirmed that both buildings had been the targets of chronic break-ins and vandalism. Although the outside of that larger building had metal siding, it was supported by huge wooden rafters, which RACDC had planned to recycle during the demolition process.

RACDC plans to build an affordable home ownership project with single family units on the site and Iffland said the target date for site preparation was summer or fall 2008. They’re now in the process of doing the final design and investigation of funding for the project.

"It could have been so much worse," Iffland said about the fire, "so we’re just grateful no one got hurt. We’re also grateful to the firefighters who responded."

Busy Time for RFD

The December 21 fire was the fourth time in two days that Randolph area firefighters had been called out.

At 12:30 a.m. on Thursday, Dec. 20, they responded to what Collette termed a "rekindle of debris from a structure fire that took place in West Braintree on Wednesday. On Thursday afternoon, they were called out again when a fuel oil truck overturned on Braintree Hill. Fortunately, Collette said, there was "no spill of any magnitude. It was minimal, less than a gallon, but the company had to offload the fuel oil into another truck. Haz-mat officials were notified, but there was nothing to investigate."

The third call of the day came when firefighters responded to the report of a propane smell on Central St. at 9 p.m.