NORWAY – No one was injured in a smoky fire that leveled a small barn on Waterford Road during a late afternoon rainstorm Monday.

“I looked out back, and I saw smoke coming from the barn,” said 15-year-old Justin Martin, who had arrived home from school about an hour earlier. He was in the white Cape-style house about 150 feet from the barn with his 12-year-old sister Jordan and their two dogs Angel and Harley when the fire was discovered.

Firefighters from Norway, Oxford, Paris and Waterford quickly doused the fire at 775 Waterford Road but thousands of dollars in machinery in the barn, including snowmobiles, lawn mowers, four wheelers and other items were destroyed. A new Harley-Davidson motorcycle, housed in a trailer parked beside the barn was removed by Chris Martin, the uncle of the two children, who arrived shortly after the fire was discovered.

“He (Justin) called me and I hustled,” said Martin, who lives on Elm Hill. Chris Martin said he told Justin to try to get the hose on the barn and call 911. Justin said the fire was too far ahead to get water on it.

The family said their Husky dog Angel is normally kept in a kennel attached to the barn on three sides with a dog entrance into the barn, but because he was sick, they kept him inside the house Monday.

“She’s gone through a sickness so we’ve been keeping her housebound,” said a relieved Deborah Piper Martin, who bought the home last year with her husband, Tim, a contractor working in Iraq.

“We lost everything in the barn,” said Martin, who was at her brother-in-law’s house when the fire broke out.

Although she did not know how old the approximately 25-by-30-foot wood-frame structure was, the Texas native said she calls it a shed rather than a barn.

“In Texas we would call it a barn, but there would be three or four of them,” said Martin. There was at least one other small outbuilding on the property that was not damaged.

Fire Chief Michael Mann said the fire was pretty much out by the time he arrived on the scene, but that firefighters contained it without much trouble.

“Everything went pretty well,” Mann said. The cause of the fire is still under investigation, he said.

“Thank goodness for my brother-in-law,” said Martin, who also credited her brother-in-law and his family with helping her family get through the crisis.

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