FFs Battle Stubborn ME Blaze, Freezing Temps

Feb. 28—FORT KENT, Maine — A fire in a building housing several businesses and apartments on Fort Kent's Main Street started near a woodstove Monday afternoon, according to Fort Kent Fire Chief Ed Endee.

Firefighters from four northern Maine departments were still working into Monday evening to extinguish the fire, which threatened to take a second building for several hours.

Wind and 11 degree air temperatures made fighting the fire more difficult.

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The 273 West Main St. building is owned by husband and wife Tracey and Evelyn Hartt. Tracey Hartt operates Performance Printing and Designs and Evelyn Hartt operates Tangles Beauty Salon within the building.

Other businesses in the building included Skin Deep By Jillian, SJV Recovery and Behavioral Health Peer Center, according to a GoFundMe.com set up to help those displaced.

Fort Kent Fire got the call around 1:30 p.m.

"It was heavily involved upon our arrival. The back end of the building was fully involved," Fort Kent Fire Chief Ed Endee said. "By the time we got set up, the front was also heavily involved."

Although the fire originated with a wood stove, it is too early to know for sure how it happened, Endee said.

Firefighters from Fort Kent, Frenchville, Eagle Lake, Madawaska and North Lakes Fire and Rescue were working to put out flames that began creeping onto a neighboring building housing Aroostook Real Estate.

By 7 p.m. Monday, no one had been injured and it appeared that the second building would be spared with only minor damage, although flames still burned strong on the first floor of the building where the fire began.

An excavator tore down the west side wall of what was once a two-story building so that firefighters could extinguish the flames.

Meanwhile public works crews salted the roadway that was glare ice from the temperatures turning the water to ice, and heated a frozen manhole cover with a blow torch so that water could drain. A SAD 27 school bus provided a warming shack for the firefighters as temperatures dipped to just above zero degrees.

Spectators watched early Monday afternoon as heavy winds blew smoke and embers throughout the air, wondering if the firefighters would be able to keep the fire from spreading.

"Every two or three years we get a big hole in the town where the buildings burn," Fort Kent resident Bob Michaud said.

In March 2012 a fire took out three Main Street buildings in the town.

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