Fire devours garage in Irasburg

Firefighters from several Orleans County communities battle a blaze on Route 14 in Irasburg Friday afternoon. (Courtesy Photos by the Irasburg Fire Department)

IRASBURG – Fire officials are unsure what caused a fire that destroyed a structure on Route 14 Friday afternoon.

Irasburg Fire Chief Robin Beaton said the first level of the building owned by Devin and Megan Chilafoux served as a garage, while the second floor housed a sauna, a weight room, and a kitchen-type room. The Chilafoux's home was in front of the garage in a separate building.

The first firefighters on the scene saw flames coming out of the vents on both ends of the building. Beaton said it was a no-win situation once the fire got into the Styrofoam foam insulation.

“Styrofoam is wicked flammable,” said Beaton. He described the building as an A-Frame type structure that had shingles all the way to the ground and two little walls with a barn-style roof. “We had shingles and stuff to fight through on both sides. One end had overhead doors, and the other had an overhead door with a spiral staircase.”

The owners lost a car, a tractor, four-wheelers, and other items in the fire. The blaze didn't flatten the building, but it's not rebuildable, especially the way it was built, said Baton.

“We had to cut a lot of holes to try to stop it,” he said. Beaton said on Sunday that he believes the owners had the building insured. “I haven't got that far with them, but I'm assuming they had insurance.”

Beaton said there isn't enough left to begin looking at what caused the fire.

“I wrote it up as an unknown origin,” he stated. “There were so many factors inside, and everything was burnt so bad you could not even begin to look.”

Beaton, who doesn't consider the fire suspicious, explained the family had been home all day, and the lady was playing with her daughter when someone knocked on her door to alert them of the fire. Beaton said if it wasn't for that unidentified person, the family might not have known about it because the house really has no windows on the back side.

Besides battling the fire, firefighters had to deal with the cold. Even though they were right beside the river, firefighters could not even begin to get water from it. Initially, they drew from a hydrant in Coventry Village but were told to stop, so they switched to a dry hydrant out of a pond on the Airport Road.

“The trucks were hauling water from quite a way away from the fire,” Beaton said. Beaton called in assistance from the Albany Fire Department, the Glover Fire Department, the Newport Center Fire Department, and the Orleans Fire Department. The Newport City Fire Department also responded with its trailer suited to fill air tanks. Beaton said they got lucky as far as dealing with cold temperatures. “The guys were getting worn out from being covered in ice and frozen. Luckily we didn't have much equipment issues, but we had a couple of chainsaws that froze up on us.”

The Irasburg tanker ended up with a frozen valve and split when they got back to the station, said Beaton, who made a temporary fix until the replacement part he expects to arrive sometime this week.