West Rutland Fire Chief Joseph Skaza said the call came in shortly after 3:15 a.m. Tuesday.
"We pulled in this morning to a fully involved building," Skaza said. "We probably had 150 feet of building burning up through the roof. The flames were 30 to 40 feet high."
By noon, there weren't any flames, but firefighters' work was far from complete. Crews used an excavator to dig through the rubble and ferret out hot spots, while other began breaking down and putting away the hoses that stretched up Marble Street, or moving trucks in and out of the grounds.
The building had once been a major processing facility for Vermont Marble Co., cutting up marble from area quarries and loading it on to train cars.
Albert Gawet said that while his company doesn't operate quarries in that area any longer, the building was still in use.
"We ran a little marble shop in there, did cutting of marble and rough stone," he said. "We used it for storage of trucks, backhoes, air compressor-type stuff."
Gawet said he rented a portion of the building to Poultney Pallets, and the two companies had a total of nine employees at the building on a typical day. He said none of the employees were working at the time of the fire.
About 60 firefighters from seven departments were at the building that stretched hundreds of feet back along the quarries and overgrown railroad tracks.
While some firefighters looked over the ruins, others were spraying down a still-smoking pile of partially charred boards. Much of the building had been reduced to a gigantic mass of smoldering ash and twisted metal.
"A fire this size, you have a lot of structural collapse," Skaza said. "The roof is caving in. The steel is twisting and bending. It's the biggest fire in a long time, as far as the amount of building involved and the amount of fire involved. It got a real jump and a head start on us."
Gawet said his building could not be salvaged.
"It's completely totaled," he said in a telephone interview around 4 p.m. "It's gone. The building is completely down. It was possibly 50 feet at its highest point. The highest point now is probably 10 feet. _It's completely flat."
Including equipment lost, Gawet said total damages are likely to come to $500,000.
"We lost several trucks, trailers, backhoes, several forklifts," he said. "I haven't really punched it all up yet, but it's going to be around half a million dollars."
Gawet said the building was insured, and is waiting to hear from his insurance company, which in turn is waiting for the results of the police investigation of the fire.
As of 5 p.m., Vermont State Police investigators said they had no information on what caused the fire.
"I hope there's a clue in there somewhere," said Detective Kraig LaPorte. "Scene examination is really in its preliminary stages. We'll be back in there tomorrow. We're still in the infant stages so it would be premature to even speculate on the cause."
LaPorte said anyone who saw the fire before the arrival of the firefighters should contact police.
Gawet said 50 to 60 percent of his business was based in the building.
"To this end of our business, it's a total disaster," he said. "We have no trucks and forklifts to move marble around. Right now, we don't really know what we're going to do."
Ash from the fire spread over a wide area, reaching Town Clerk Jayne Pratt's house on Durgy Hill, roughly half a mile away.
"The ash chunks were like this," Pratt said, holding her hands apart roughly the length of a football. "They were big, huge ones, enough to scare my dog. It was all over, on my lawn, on my deck."
On Highland Avenue, hot ash set fire to Bernard Zuk's lawn, forcing the man to fight the flames with a garden hose.
Gawet said his company bought the building in 1979. It was used to cut up blocks of marble taken from area quarries and then load them on to train cars.
"When they built this in the 1920s, it was the modern-day facility for that era," Gawet said. "The building had such a historic value to the area. Anybody you talk to, they know where this place was."
A total of about 60 firefighters from West Rutland, Rutland Town, Clarendon, Pittsford, Ira, Shrewsbury and Proctor were on the scene, and Proctor's fire department had a crew standing by at the West Rutland station.
The Red Cross was on hand, bringing water and sandwiches to firefighters through the day. Regional Ambulance Service was also on the scene, but nobody was hurt.
Skaza said firefighters faced dangers from the many propane tanks just outside the building and the live power lines that were falling away from it.
"(Central Vermont Public Service Corp.) came in and cut the lines for us," he said. "We put a water curtain on the propane tanks to cool them down."
Edward Gilman, Select Board chairman and the town's water commissioner, said 860,000 gallons of water came out of the town system to fight the fire. Gilman said the entire town only uses 325,000 gallons in a typical day.
"They called us early this morning, looking to start our second well," he said. "We used up pretty much all our tank. If they'd had to fight the fire any longer than they did, we would have run out of water. This is why we're putting an additional tank on the south side of town."
Town Manager Thomas Yennerell said the town got at least one phone call complaining about dirty water during the fire.
"When the water is moving that fast, it stirs up sediment and spreads it through the town," Yennerell said.
Not all the water used at the scene came from town wells. Skaza said a total of six tanker trucks with capacities ranging from 1,200 to 1,800 gallons made an average of 17 round trips each between the fire and the Castleton River on Water Street.
Early rumors flew around town that the nearby Carving Studio was burning. Carving Studio executive director Carol Driscoll said even though their building was undamaged, the mill had inspired many of the artists working there and its destruction was a loss.
"It's an end of an era in a sense," she said. "Whatever they do, it's different."
Driscoll said the Carving Studio was negotiating with the Gawets to use some of the building as classroom space, and that the fire may affect Sculptfest, the studio's annual event scheduled for September.
"We have proposals from artists to install works along there," she said. "I think we can still do it, but it's going to be transformed. You're not going to see the old gang-saw building anymore."
Driscoll said she saw the fire around 3 a.m. from her home on Valley View Lane when her daughter woke her after having a nightmare.
"I looked out the window and saw big, smoky clouds," she said.
Driscoll said she called 911 to find many others had already reported the fire.
"Fifteen minutes later, the whole ridge was illuminated," she said. "I watched it until it really started to smolder. You could no longer see the flames a little after 4."
It was a long day for firefighters. Skaza said the flames were under control shortly after 6 a.m. and firefighters left the scene around 3 p.m., only to return a short time later due to a flare-up.
"With a building that size, rekindling is not uncommon," he said as firefighters put away gear and washed down the trucks at around 5 p.m.
"We'll be watching it and monitoring it through the night. It's hard to say when it's totally out. There's just so much debris."
Skaza said he was very proud of how his crews performed.
"That was one of the largest fires I've ever seen and probably will ever see in my town," he said. "Things came together well and a great job was done by all the departments - all volunteers - involved."
