MEXICO – Raymond Holman thought a garbage truck had driven past his home when he felt the house shake early Tuesday morning.

Then he checked the time. It couldn’t be a trash truck at 4:30 a.m., he thought.

Holman lives behind the Food City grocery store. He said he was washing his hands when the bathroom mirror began vibrating.

“There was an explosion and it shook my house at 4:30 in the morning,” Holman said. “I felt the whole house shake, then I heard the scanner say there was a fire at Mead and a building had collapsed.”

He rushed to 262 Main St., his father-in-law’s house, where there’s a direct view of MeadWestvaco’s paper mill from across the Androscoggin River.

When he got there at 4:50 a.m., extensive flames were showing.

“I saw flames going pretty good inside the building through its windows,” Holman said.

Orange glow

He estimated the flames leaped as high as 100 feet. Some obscured a towering smokestack behind the burning building.

“It was still dark out, but the mill had a nice orange glow to it this morning. When I first got here, it looked like daylight from the flames,” he said.

As he watched the fire, he listened to scanner chatter detailing the action of emergency responders as they mobilized and attacked the blaze. Then, Holman said, the phone began ringing nonstop.

“A lot of people called me, asking, ‘Is Mead on fire?’ And I would say, ‘Yep,'” he added.

He thought the building that had collapsed may have contained medical offices at one time.

“When my dad worked there, he used to go get his steel-toed boots in that building,” Holman said.

tkarkos@sunjournal.com

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