Fire guts home in Perry; officials identify evening blaze as suspicious

PERRY – A fire of suspicious origin destroyed a single-family home Thursday night.

The home belonged to Greg Hastings and Sandi Yarmal. No one was home at the time.

The fire started around 7 p.m. on the South Meadow Road and was reported by a neighbor.

“When we got there, we had fire in the basement and back corner and coming up the walls, and then she just went everywhere,” Fire Chief Paula Frost said Friday.

There was so much fire, the fire chief said, that it was too dangerous to attack it from the inside.

When firefighters arrived, Frost said, the basement windows were black. “She’d already vented out through the basement, which gave it air and all those combustible gases burned hot, and of course it was fully furnished so it was a huge fire load,” she added.

All firefighters could do was spill thousands of gallons of water on it from outside the building. “When you can’t get inside and you’re outside spraying water through open ends, you tend to chase it. We tried to chase it toward the back so we could isolate it. We did pretty well at that. We couldn’t get inside where there was so much fire in the basement, the first floor wasn’t safe,” she said.

While firefighters were attacking the house fire, they noticed smoke coming from the second floor of the couple’s garage, which is separate from the house. Firefighters rushed to the second floor and were able to extinguish that fire before it did much damage.

There were two oil tanks in the basement that were part of the couple’s heating system.

“What we surmised happened is that somehow fuel got out of the two big barrels so we had this huge vapor cloud building up against the ceiling. When it built up enough heat and the gases got hot enough, it just flashed – it flashed twice, actually. The first time it just about put itself out. But then it got going again as it must have vented a little bit,” Frost said.

Asked if the fire was suspicious, Frost said it was. “The fire marshal is there and he’ll probably be there most of the day,” she said.

It has been a tough few months for the family. Hastings, an electrician, was injured in an all-terrain vehicle accident and is in a hospital in Bangor. Yarmal, who is executive director of the Pleasant Point Health Center, was away at a conference.

Fire departments from Pleasant Point, Robbinston, Eastport and Pembroke assisted at the scene.

Frost said Pleasant Point’s tower truck was a big help because firefighters were able to attack the fire from the top of the building. “There was no way we could get to it unless we could get on top of it and shoot [water] down, which is what we did. So we were able to save enough of the shell of the house so the fire marshal could look [inside],” she said.

An investigator from the State Fire Marshal’s Office was on site all day.

Because there were no fire hydrants in the area, the fire departments had to truck water to the fire, which was a challenge.

Neighbors hearing the report of the fire on the scanner rushed to the scene. Once there, they abandoned their cars on the side of the road.

“We dumped our first two tanks of water and I literally could not get another truck in there because they couldn’t get by all the people gawking,” Frost said.

If they had been doing an interior attack on the fire, Frost said, a blocked road could have cost lives.

Some people tried to help after a neighbor volunteered her property as a parking lot. “I looked [as] they pushed a truck out of the way because it had stalled. It looked like valet parking at a big sporting event. Every car that had a set of keys in it they was moving it and putting it up on her lawn,” she said. “My truck even moved.”

Downeast EMS, the Eastport Police Department and the Maine State Police also assisted.

Firefighters were on the scene for about seven hours.