April 08--GREENWICH -- The owner of the former paper mill that burned over the weekend said there is "no way" the fire there began accidentally.
Pennsylvania resident Moses Glick, who purchased the former Stevens & Thompson Paper Co. mill in 2009, said the interiors of the buildings were too wet from exposure to the elements for the fire to have begun by any means other than arson.
"There's no way it caught fire from someone dropping a cigarette or some sort of accident, it was too wet in there," he said.
The main part of the mill on county Route 53 burned Sunday in a three-alarm blaze that could be seen for miles. The fire was spotted by State Police around 2 a.m. Sunday.
State Police investigators were called in Sunday to investigate the fire as an apparent arson, authorities said. There was no electricity to the building and no heat or other known source of fire.
Glick, who has been hoping to redevelop the property into vacation homes or condominiums, said he did not have any insurance on the mill. He said the fire should not derail those plans.
Middle Falls Fire Chief Dennis McDonald said the investigation was ongoing and a cause or area of origin of the fire had not been determined.
The state Office of Fire Prevention and Control was working with Washington County fire investigators and State Police.
Glick said there have been problems with trespassers, particularly thieves looking to steal metal to sell to scrap yards, on the mill property over the years.
He said he mulled putting a security guard there, but the 28-acre property is too big, with multiple ways onto it and problems too sporadic, for a guard to be effective.
Glick said he has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on cleanup efforts on the property, most recently focusing on groundwater. The property was identified as a Superfund site in the mid-2000s and cleaned of toxic chemicals.
Glick said he had planned to start demolition of the buildings on the property this summer. The fire will speed up that process, but make disposal of the material much more expensive, he said.
He was quite upset at the likelihood that the fire was intentionally set.
"If they don't get them in this life, they'll get them in the next life," he said of whoever was responsible for the blaze.
Greenwich Supervisor Sara Idleman said Glick had at one point shared plans for a housing development on the property, though the plans had not progressed in recent years.
The mill sits on the Batten Kill on a dead end road.
"It's an area I'd love to see put to good use," Idleman said. "It's a beautiful spot."
Stevens & Thompson operated a paper mill on the property for more than a century before selling it to American Tissue Inc., which ran it for about five years until closing it in 2001. Over the years, police have made numerous arrests there of metal thieves and trespassers.
Copyright 2014 - The Post-Star, Glens Falls, N.Y.
