Strong winds and a wall of flames more than three-stories high greeted fire crews.
RUMFORD – One hundred firefighters from nine River Valley towns battled the four-alarm fire Tuesday morning at the MeadWestvaco paper mill complex.
Strong winds forced arriving firefighters into a quick stance to protect the mill’s No. 15 and No. 9 complexes, which flanked the inferno.
Mill spokesman Steve Hudson said the huge No. 15 complex, built in 1980, houses a machine that makes lightweight coated paper.
“Our people on the inside of Building No. 15 were on the catwalk, and they had a good fight to keep the fire out of there,” Woulfe said.
Deputy fire Chief Benjamin Byam said firefighters on the catwalk had a difficult time advancing through the building to attack the fire due to hot steam shooting out of a broken line.
The No. 9 complex, a long, rectangular building adjacent to the Androscoggin River, contains pulp dryers and administrative offices.
After being summoned to the blaze, fire Chief John Woulfe said he called mutual aid immediately and set up vehicles “for a long-term operation.”
He arrived 10 minutes after the first tanker truck rolled into the MeadWestvaco yard, greeted by a wall of wind-driven flames 14 feet wide shooting more than three stories high in an area known by mill employees as “the wind tunnel.”
“That’s the windiest corner of the mill,” Hudson said. “That’s where the wind coming down the river meets up with wind coming through the yard.”
According to the National Weather Service in Gray, air temperatures in the Rumford region at the time of the fire were in the teens.
Rumford’s new ladder truck – dubbed by critics as “the Monster Truck” because it’s too big for the fire station – outperformed expectations.
Byam said the 110-foot-long extension ladder has a waterway with a nozzle at the end that can be operated from the ground by remote control. That negates the need to put a firefighter on the ladder in hazardous situations.
Woulfe, who has taken a lot of heat for buying the truck, said firefighters used it to knock down the fire.
“We couldn’t bring the truck in close enough (to the collapse zone), but it worked as it was designed to do. The ladder extended out high enough to get above the fire area. We were pumping 1,000 gallons of water a minute off of it, and it put out most of the fire,” he said.
By early afternoon, most of the mutual aid firefighters had returned to their towns. Rumford had a small crew standing by while MeadWestvaco crews demolished the building shell and removed debris.
At 6:30 p.m., Andover firefighters standing by at Rumford’s station returned to the scene to help extinguish a flare-up, Byam said.
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