Fire put out in old pulp elevator at Katahdin Paper Co.

MILLINOCKET ? It wasn’t one of the biggest fires the Millinocket Fire Department has ever fought, but it definitely was one of the highest.

Firefighters worked for about four hours Wednesday battling a small blaze in an old pulp elevator at Katahdin Paper Co. No one was injured.

The fire was about 75 feet off the ground, Fire Chief Wayne Campbell said.

“We were never in any danger, but it sure was difficult to get to,” Campbell said Wednesday. “It was about 75 feet up in the air. We have a 106-foot aerial ladder that we used to get it, and we could just barely reach it from where we had to set up.”

Demolition workers from Gallant Enterprises of New Brunswick inadvertently set off the blaze at the northern end of the Katahdin property on Katahdin Avenue as they worked to demolish the pulp elevator, which is about 200 feet long and about 100 feet high and used to stack wood for storage, Campbell said.

A worker cutting metal with a blowtorch ignited a small stack of wood on the elevator. While the fire was never likely to damage the structure or hurt anybody, the workers couldn’t do their jobs with the fire blazing away, so they called in firefighters at about 11 a.m., Campbell said.

About a dozen firefighters responded and cleared the scene at about 3:15 p.m., the fire chief said.

Katahdin workers and demolition crews have been clearing away old structures from the property all winter, he said.