Remnants of old sawmill ravaged by fire Monday on Old Charlton Road
OXFORD – The remnants of an old sawmill were ravaged by a two-alarm outbuilding fire Monday on Old Charlton Road. No one was hurt.Fire Chief Laurent McDonald said crews responded to an alarm at 11:38 a.m. at 30 Old Charlton Road. Firefighters were there until 4 p.m.
McDonald said there was a partial building and stored lumber at the site, which used to be the home of Stone's Saw Mill.
In addition, the property owner has been using the area to place old items there including a filled 53-foot box trailer, tires and plastic water tanks, as well as old televisions and computers.
“We’ve been working with DEP with the property to clean up some of the stuff,” McDonald said. “One of the property owners were there earlier in the morning, still continuing his cleanup efforts to basically, clean up the property and dispose stuff. About an hour after he left is when the fire was discovered.”
Despite being nothing of major value destroyed at the site, it was in the best interest to contain it and put it out, rather than just let it burn, McDonald said. The footprint of the fire was 100-feet-by-100-feet, he said.
“You wouldn’t let it burn because you have plastics,” McDonald said. “Fortunately, the owner started cleaning up the old tires and moved a bunch of them. There were still some there but they weren’t in the area that (was) involved.”
McDonald said they do not have a cause for the fire but they don’t think it’s suspicious. The investigation is ongoing, he said.
“It appears for all intent and purposes it’s accidental in nature,” McDonald said. “Because there were TV items and glass and bottles and whatnot, there’s different speculations you can go on. It may have been sunlight amplified through glass. We can’t really put a finger on the cause but we believe it to be accidental. But, where it started, it did get some of the heavy timbers and grass on the fire which spread to the remnants of the building.”
Aug. 31, 1992, the sawmill was destroyed by fire. The fire was discovered fully involved at 11:10 p.m., shooting flames 20 to 30 feet into the air. It smoldered all night and broke out again the next morning. The pile of slab wood that burned would have been ground into landscaping woodchips and sawdust for farms, while a stack of 30 15-foot logs, which would have been cut into 2,000 linear feet of planking, also burned. Firefighters from Oxford, Charlton, Webster, Leicester and Sutton responded to the late-night blaze as Auburn firefighters waited at the Oxford firehouse.
McDonald said the fire presents greater problems for cleanup.
“Fire is not a good way to dispose of anything because it causes great problems, plus what it does to the air,” McDonald said.
Monday, Oxford fire received mutual aid from Charlton, Dudley and Webster.
This article originally appeared on Telegram & Gazette: Remnants of old sawmill ravaged by fire Monday on Old Charlton Road
