17 departments fight recycling plant fire

TOPSHAM – Firefighters from 17 departments responded Tuesday to a three-alarm fire at a metal recycling yard that has burned four times in the last nine years.

The fire at Grimmel Industries, in the former Pejepscot paper mill, began around 3 a.m. Tuesday and was extinguished by around noon, said Shawn Larrabee, deputy chief of the Topsham Fire Department. He said no one was working at the site when the fire began, and no one was injured in the blaze.

The fire began in a pile of metal scrap and destroyed three empty buildings, he said. Many of the other departments that fought the blaze sent tanker trucks because the fire blocked access to the Androscoggin River.

“Every time we come here it’s a very difficult fire to put out,” he said.

Officials from the Sagadahoc County Emergency Management Authority were called to assist the firefighters and to ensure that potentially contaminated runoff from the fire scene did not run into the river, Director Rusty Robertson said.

Investigators from the State Fire Marshal’s Office were at the scrap yard Tuesday to determine the cause of the fire and were expected to remain there most of the day.

Firefighters from 20 towns battled a 2002 fire at the metal recycling plant in which a two-story pile of recyclable materials and a small building burned.

Styrofoam and other materials in the subbasement of an outbuilding caught fire in 1999.

A 1995 fire at the former paper mill that caused more than $1 million in damage was ruled to be arson after fire investigators tested samples of rubble from the century-old building along the Androscoggin River.

Fire departments on the scene Tuesday were from Harpswell, Cundy’s Harbor, Durham, Pownal, Woolwich, Georgetown, Richmond, Yarmouth, Freeport, Falmouth, North Yarmouth, Lisbon, Bowdoin, Bowdoinham, West Bath, Bath and Brunswick.