SCHUYLKILL HAVEN - The fire was devastating, but it could have been worse.
Although Wednesday afternoon's fire destroyed both Schuylkill Hose Company No. 2's engines, hazmat truck and gear and caused more than $1 million in damage, a significant portion of the station at St. Peter and Union streets was saved, company Chief James Reed said Thursday morning.
"It's a miracle this back room didn't burn," he said, referring to a large community room at the rear of the building. Two sets of double doors at each end of a short hallway separated the engine room, which sustained the heaviest damage, and the community room. The engine room door was propped open, but the community room doors were shut.
"We're lucky these doors were shut or the fire would have reached down here," Reed said.
Both sets of doors sustained visible smoke and water damage. A small kitchen and the station offices behind the engine room were damaged by smoke and water as well.
None of the borough fire department's dive team equipment, stored in a shed about 20 feet from the engine room, was damaged in the fire, either.
"The dive team is still in service," team captain Carter Hoffman said. "We had a lot of calls last night and this morning asking us, but we're still up and running."
The station's social quarters in the basement sustained only minor water damage. Crews from Berks Fire and Water Restoration Inc., Reading, were cleaning up water and removing tarps covering furniture and a pool table in the room Thursday.
"We're meeting here tonight," Reed said Thursday. "We're having our regular monthly meeting, which happens to fall on the second Thursday of the month, only with a change in agenda. I said having the meeting in here was probably the best thing we could do, to give the guys the feeling that we didn't lose too much."
Reed said the company will decide how they will proceed for the next few weeks at the meeting.
"We have a lot of offers, so we need to sit down and figure out what's best for us," he said.
Several fire companies from Schuylkill, Berks and Luzerne counties have offered to loan Schuylkill Hose trucks and equipment, Schuylkill Haven Fire Department Assistant Fire Chief Glenn Sattizahn said. The borough has offered to keep an engine in their garage on Haven Street.
The gutted engine room is off-limits until the exact cause of the fire is determined. Trooper John F. Burns, state police fire marshal, and Alex Profka, cause and origin investigator for Volunteer Firemen's Insurance Services Inc., spent more than two hours examining the room Thursday morning but said the cause was still under investigation.
"If I had something to tell you, I would," Burns said Thursday afternoon. He and Profka declined further comment on if the fire started in the 1994 American LeFrance engine parked in the middle bay, as originally thought.
Sattizahn said it would likely be a few days before the cause was determined and the company could begin cleaning up the engine room.
The status of the structure is also remains unclear.
"We'll have no idea if it's structurally sound until we get engineers in here," said Cork Fenstermacher, a 32-year volunteer firefighter with Schuylkill Hose.
Padlocks were bolted to the doors to ensure no one entered the building.
Meanwhile, the two dozen company members who gathered at the station throughout the day did what they could to start the recovery.
Members transferred computer equipment, clipboards and documents from the station office to the dive team shed, which will serve as a temporary office. Phone lines and Internet connections were also in the process of being established in the shed, and food donations poured in from local grocery stores, restaurants and businesses to feed workers.
"Even though we won't be in the station, we expect to be back up and running in a week or two," Sattizahn said.
Fenstermacher, who helped build the station with Norm Bensinger Contractors in the late 1970s, said seeing the building he laid brick and block for so heavily damaged was "awful."
The company lost its two American LeFrance engines, a hazmat truck, self-contained air packs, an air bottle re-filling system, all their hoses and all the firefighters' gear, including helmets, jackets, pants and boots in the blaze, which started around 3:20 p.m. Wednesday.
"When you see your engines like that, it just rips your heart out," said Les Morgan, a volunteer firefighter with Schuylkill Hose for five years.
However, Morgan, Fenstermacher and others are already looking toward the future.
"Getting it back up and running again is our main goal," Fenstermacher said, "We need to get the engine room fixed, get new apparatus."
"We will prevail," Morgan said. "Everyone comes together when they need to. Worse things than this have happened."
"We're all going to work together," Pat Wade, a volunteer firefighter for more than 30 years, said. "We're a good company."
The words spray-painted on a makeshift, temporary plywood garage door said it all.
"We will be back."
Republished with permission from the Republican & Herald
