Blue hill fire leaves 47 without jobs> Saturday evening blaze lebeled three businesses

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BLUE HILL — Forty-seven employees of a shopping center gutted by a raging fire that destroyed three businesses Saturday night were left unemployed two weeks before Christmas. The charred remains of the 19,800-square-foot Blue Hill Shopping Center, which contained the area’s largest grocery store, still smoldered Sunday.

No injuries were reported in the spectacular blaze in which 60 firefighters from 11 fire departments battled flames that soared as high as 40 feet for nearly four hours.

Shoppers and employees at Largay’s IGA Food Store were evacuated safely before a 4:53 p.m. report of smoke in the building. The resulting blaze could be seen in the sky from as far away as Surry and North Penobscot, according to Blue Hill Fire Chief Dennis Robertson.

Big A Auto Parts store and A Cut Above hair salon, which also were located in the shopping center, were closed to business when the fire broke out. The estimated loss for all three businesses was $650,000.

“It’s going to be tough, real tough,” said Selectman Gordon Emerson. “I think people will be able to do their shopping. It’s going to take money out of Blue Hill, but people losing their work at this time of year, that’s the real tragedy.”

Contacted at his Brewer home late Sunday, Tom Largay, owner of the shopping center, said he will decide whether to rebuild after meeting with his insurance company today. The value of the shopping center was listed as $1,401,300 in a 1997 town report.

Store employees are “stunned,” said Ralston Means, part-time manager and head of the dairy and frozen foods department at Largay’s IGA. Means, who lives in Brooklin, said he had been employed there for 10 years. “It hasn’t really set in yet,” he said.

Means said he would survive financially with savings and his part-time job as corrections officer at the Hancock County Sheriff’s Department, but expressed concern for his co-workers.

“A lot of them have been living week to week,” Means said. Markets in surrounding areas may see more business and need more staffing, but he expressed concern that skilled employees such as meat cutters and managers may have to work in entry-level jobs.

He said local businesses, “even the competition,” have called to offer space and support.

Blue Hill Auto Parts owner Peter Clapp said his four employees appeared “bewildered,” by the fire and its repercussions. “They are worried about their jobs and the holidays,” he said.

The Blue Hill resident has owned the auto parts store since 1976 and moved into the shopping center site about three years ago. Clapp said his $225,000 inventory was partly insured, but interior fixtures worth a total of about $100,000 were uninsured.

A Cut Above owner Marilyn Lawson of Blue Hill said she first received word of the fire from an employee whose husband volunteers at the Fire Department.

“My husband and I went up [to the salon] and got out what we could,” she said. With the help of a few friends and some spectators, Lawson said, she managed to salvage half the chairs, all of the shelving, couches, and some retail hair products. The group stopped gathering goods when the salon started filling up with smoke, she said.

Lawson said she and her six full- and part-time employees were “shocked” by the fire, but they may not be out of work for long, she said. The owner of nearby Hairplanes salon offered use of its space.

Flames initially broke out in a loading area in the northwest section of Largay’s, according to Robertson.

With 14 firetrucks and two utility vehicles, firefighters from Blue Hill, Brooklin, Brooksville, Bucksport, Ellsworth, Orland, Penobscot, Sedgwick, Stonington, Surry and Trenton pumped an estimated 400,000 gallons of water and roughly 100 gallons of foam onto the fire, said dispatcher Richard Horton.

Elise Harnett, who watched the fire erupt, likened it to steam escaping from a covered pot, curling out over its sides. Smoke from the eaves engulfed the roof of the building, she said, “and it just went on like that. Smoke. Smoke. Smoke. … Then, boom, flames appeared in the windows.”

“When the roof caught on fire, the flames were twice as high as the treetops,” said Harnett, a Blue Hill resident. “It was so hot standing there. … The roof caved in and went right on down the line. We could hear things exploding, popping.”

Firefighters initially entered Largay’s main entrance in an attempt to isolate the fire, Horton said. “Then, they told me they heard fire racing through the ceiling,” he said, adding that the open-truss structure overhead served as a passageway for the blaze to spread over all three businesses.

Firefighters then attacked the blaze from outside, hoping to contain it before it reached the auto parts store. Within 30 minutes of the initial call, the supermarket roof collapsed, Horton said.

Two firefighters remained at the site throughout the night to keep the smoldering area secure and to ensure that the fire did not reignite. Because the three businesses’ inventories contained hazardous materials such as cleaners, paints and hairspray, Horton said, it was safer to let them simmer than to mix them with water that could run off the site.

Brooklin and Sedgwick firefighters returned to the South Street site Sunday morning to pump additional water onto hot spots, Horton said.

State Fire Marshal John Morse said the cause of the fire is under investigation. Robertson said Morse was summoning specialists to further examine the cause. Department of Environmental Protection officials were scheduled to examine the site Sunday afternoon.

“I feel bad for the owners, and I feel really bad for the people who worked in these businesses and two weeks before Christmas have this happen,” said Horton.

He remained optimistic, however. “The human spirit is pretty resilient,” he said.

Emerson, in his 37th year as a Blue Hill selectman, said he hasn’t seen a blaze like this since the First National Supermarket and nearby stores burned to the ground in 1968.

In that blaze, fire swept through a section of Main Street, flattening four businesses and damaging two houses, according to a Bangor Daily News report. That fire leveled First National Supermarket, Penobscot Bay Gas Co., Butler’s Electrical Contractors and Sweet’s Antiques.