At 10:39 on the morning of March 25, 2014, an alarm was reported from 159 West Main Street in Stamford. It was routed to the appropriate state police, fire department, EMS, and rescue agencies. As the the first assistant chief of the Stamford Fire Department, Don Van Etten arrived at the Cyr Center (aka, Rexmere Hotel) at 10:44. Don Scully, also of the department, was about a minute behind him.
There was no apparent problem on approach, so Van Etten drove around to the lakeside entrance and ran up to the grand ballroom door. From there, he could see through the ballroom to Don Scully who had arrived at the main entrance. Between them was a wisp of smoke—a report of “smoke visible in building” was recorded at 10:45.
By the time Van Etten came around and joined Scully at the main entrance, the fire had blown out the window to the left of the door and a new source of oxygen was feeding the fire.
The building was reported as being a working structure fire at 10:46.
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- The heat inside had broken through a window and oxygen was feeding the fire.
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- We called for assistance from Grand Gorge, Hobart, and Jefferson. Jefferson set up to try to contain the fire on the east wall. A sidelight: the dark smoke means that the fire is gaining ground—firefighters always are hoping for white smoke, meaning the fire is losing the battle.
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- Throughout the morning, we called for more help and specialized equipment, but the fire rapidly spread through the east wall.
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- We set up 2 portable pools (blue) in front of the Cyr Center (red). All access to Churchill Park was closed except for fire vehicles, and
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- tankers would drive up West Main Street, turn into Holly Tree Lane. They would then reverse back onto West Main to the queue waiting for access to the portable ponds. Emptied, they would head out on another water run
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- Pumpers from 11 departments and the 6 aerial trucks sent a total of 4 million gallons of water onto the fire and neighboring grounds and structures to contain the fire.
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- Aerial trucks have extendable ladders to reach up up several stories (you have often seen them at local festivals with their ladders extended and holding an American flag aloft, or on newsreels fighting fires on the 4th, or 5th floors of buildings).
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- Aerial trucks may have an aerial waterway with pumping capacity and a built-in pipe to automatically deliver heavy streams of water into the top of a fire. The Stamford aerial is not formally classified as an aerial: it is a pumper with an elevated waterway and does not have the mandated number of smaller ladders.
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- Bill Boyle’s excavators sifted through the rubble so Sidney’s aerial could extinguish residual fires. We would have been there days longer without these excavators to through sift through the debris.
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- This is the smoke as seen from Mount Utsayantha that afternoon. Note the color of the smoke: they finally got their white smoke.
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- This is the weather Doppler taken that morning, recording the smoke from the fire stretching about half way to Middleburgh an hour and fourteen minutes after the first call.
