BNAS Hanger 1 Fire

Engine 2, Tower 1 and 2 EMS units responded to BNAS for a structure fire in Hangar 1. The hangar was in the process of being demolished at the time of the fire. No injuries were reported.

SUN JOURNAL

BRUNSWICK (AP) - A spectacular fire that could be seen far and wide destroyed an abandoned World War II-era hangar at the Brunswick Naval Air Station on Wednesday.

The fire at Hangar One was reported shortly after 2 p.m., and billowing smoke from the 50,000-square-foot structure could be seen miles away as firefighters from surrounding towns put out the flames. No injuries were reported.

The cause of the blaze hasn't been determined, but it could be connected to ongoing demolition work, said air station spokesman John James.

A demolition company had recently begun taking down the hangar, and a crew was on site Wednesday continuing the job.

James said the structure was one of the last wooden hangars in Maine.

BRUNSWICK — The last wooden World War II hangar in Maine went out with a bang Wednesday afternoon, as an engulfing blaze interrupted the old building's otherwise routine demolition.

"End-to-end, right-to-left, one giant ball of fire," recalled Bath Fire Chief Stephen Hinds this morning. "It was huge. It literally went the entire building from one end to the other — completely involved."

Hangar 1 at Brunswick Naval Air Station was uninhabited and "about two-thirds torn down" when the fire started, said John James, public affairs officer at the base. A construction company was on hand Wednesday working to raze the 50,000-square-foot building, said James.

The fire was reported shortly after 2 p.m. The inferno drew fire crews from Topsham, Freeport, Wiscasset, Bath, Lisbon and Brunswick to join the naval air station's fire department. No injuries were reported.

Hinds said the fire crews were on scene for about six hours — "three or four" of which "were really under the gun there."

"Fortunately, the wind is blowing smoke and embers across the runway," said James from his cell phone at the site of the fire Wednesday afternoon. "The wind is going in the perfect direction. There's no threat to other buildings or aircraft. No aircraft is in the vicinity of this."

James said that the blaze "is not a Navy fire" and that the base is not claiming the building as a loss. He said that part of the base's agreement with Gray Construction, the firm that in 2005 built Hangar 6, was that the contractor would also tear down Hangar 1.

A fence was then put up around the hangar, electricity and gas had been cut off and asbestos removed, explained James. Essentially, when the contractor arrived, the Navy washed its hands of the building, he said.

"They own all the steel inside it, they own all the wood inside it," he said. "It's their construction site — their fire."

Hinds said he believed federal investigators would be called in to determine the cause of the blaze, but his initial thought was that "something with the demolition went awry."

The woman who answered the phone at the Maine State Fire Marshal's Office on Wednesday said state fire officials would not be investigating the incident.

"The backhoe operator noticed some smoke coming out of the rubble, and he dug down," said James this morning. "Some air must have gotten to it, and it just shot up. The fire department was 1,000 feet away, and got there in one minute — but it had escalated."

According to a history of the base written in 1959, Hangar 1 became home to a skating rink during the period between when the Navy deactivated the base in 1946 and reactivated it again in 1951.

Early in the life of the naval air station — which was built in 1943 — and after the 1951 return of the military, the structure housed planes; P2V "Neptune" patrol bombers at the time.

"For 50 years, the hangar could hold four P-3 Orion's nose to nose," James said. He said the hangar was abandoned about two years ago.

In 2011, the Navy is slated to leave the base and turn it over to the community for redevelopment. The group in charge of planning for that transition is the Brunswick Local Redevelopment Authority. That panel's top staffer said Hangar 1 wasn't in the authority's future plans for base reuse.

"That building was coming down, and we wanted it coming down," said Steve Levesque, executive director of the LRA. "It wasn't really suitable for redevelopment. It was unsafe and the money to rebuild that would have been exorbitant. We supported the Navy's action to demolish it."

BNAS Hanger Fire, June 13, 2007