WEST RUTLAND, Vt. (AP) -- Investigators are having a difficult time trying to determine what caused the fire that destroyed the Gawet Marble & Granite mill.
The 80-year-old mill was destroyed in an inferno that began early Tuesday morning and needed roughly a million gallons of water to put out. Vermont State Police said their investigation into the cause of the fire continues.
``We're trying to get some interviews completed,'' said Detective Sgt. Robert Kalinowski, a state fire investigator. ``The long and short of it is, with all the devastation, it's hard to determine anything.''
Kalinowski said police have not found any signs that the blaze was suspicious.
Firefighters got the call at 3:17 a.m. Tuesday and arrived to find the building engulfed in flames that reached 30 feet into the night sky.
Sixty firefighters from six local departments fought the blaze. It was three hours before the fire was under control and several more until it was out. Ash scattered over a large area in town and set one person's lawn on fire.
In its heyday, the building was used by the Vermont Marble Company to cut stone from area quarries and load it onto train cars for shipment around the nation. Owner Albert Gawet, whose company bought the building in 1979, said it was state-of-the-art in its day.
Although the site wasn't nearly as active as it had been, Gawet still used the building for some rough stone work and to store trucks and other equipment, and a great deal of the company's equipment was lost in the fire.
Gawet said Tuesday that with the vehicles and equipment he lost at the building, which included two trucks, a backhoe and three forklifts, he expected damages to come to roughly $500,000.
Friday, he said he was estimating twice that in losses.
``With everything in there, it's going to be more like $700,000 to $800,000,'' he said. ``That's not even counting my tenant's losses. With that, it may well be up near a million.''
Gawet said the facility was 50 to 60 percent of his business, but that he was trying to find other work for the handful of employees who worked out of the building.
``We've gotten some material and some inventory,'' he said. ``We're going to be working on it nearby, outside. We do that in the springtime, anyway.''
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