Forest Street fire claims $10k damage, but no injuries
Published on December 20th, 2000
STONEHAM, MA - A two-alarm fire on Forest Street last Thursday afternoon wreaked an estimated $10,000 damage on an old house, which luckily housed only furniture.
The small, wooden, one-level structure, described by Stoneham Fire Captain Douglas Griffin as a “carriage house” is located around 50 yards behind the 35 Forest St. home of Leander Pease. Pease stores furniture in the smaller house.
“I think it can be refurbished,” Griffin said.
But more important, nobody was hurt.
Griffin said the fire department suspects that faulty wiring started the fire.
“We were happy to find out there were no occupants because we only had seven guys. If we had to make a rescue, we would have been in trouble,” Griffin said.
At the Dec. 5 Selectmen’s meeting Selectmen voted to hire a firefighter to replace a recent retiree. Issues of staffing have plagued the department since the budget belt-tightening of the early 1990s.
The first alarm was sounded at 2:41 p.m. on Dec. 14. Upon arrival at 2:47 p.m., Griffin sounded the second alarm which triggers the callback of off-duty personnel and assistance from nearby departments. Wakefield and Melrose sent firefighters, and Melrose covered the Stoneham station.
“We usually like to respond in three minutes,” Stoneham Fire Chief Larry Lamey said. “Fires spread four times per minute.”
A problem with the town call boxes sent the wrong address through dispatch to the fire station.
“The contractor is looking at the problem today,” Griffin said Friday, Dec. 15.
The original call came in from an off-duty state trooper who saw smoke.
On the scene Griffin said he couldn’t get his trucks as close as he wanted due to icy conditions on the driveway at 35 Forest. But the firefighters stretched 200 feet of hose to the smoke-filled house, knocked out the windows for ventilation, and got the fire under control quickly.
“OK, Firefighting 101: you’d have three to four men on each truck, a hose wagon to run a supply line of water to the truck running the attack line running to the fire and a ladder for rescue,” Griffin explained.
Stoneham responded to the Forest Street fire with the department’s ladder/pump combo running the attack line and a second engine running a supply line.
“Everyone did a real nice job,” Griffin said. “But if we had to make a rescue, we would have been hurting.”
The firefighters returned safely to the Stoneham station at 4:40 p.m. Work to repair the call boxes is ongoing. And so is the debate over police and fire department staffing.
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