BUCKFIELD – Fire officials may never determine the cause of a fast-moving fire that destroyed the two-story home of Tony and Cathy Starbird early Thursday morning.

The fire is believed to have started in the basement near the furnace, but Buckfield Assistant Fire Chief David Knox said the damage was too extensive for State Fire Marshal investigators to determine the cause.

The Starbirds and their young children left their Shymor Lane home just after 6 a.m., but turned around at the end of their road after their daughter said she’d forgotten her glasses. By the time they returned to the house the fire had started, Knox said, with heavy black smoke billowing out around the chimney.

The fire burned through the building quickly, Knox said, and firefighters making the initial entry into the building backed out almost immediately because “as we tried to enter the building, the floors were already buckling.”

“It got real hot, real fast, and burned through the rafters real fast,” Knox said. The racing blaze burst through the roof and created a plume of dark smoke and steam. The first and second floors collapsed into the basement, forcing fire crews to attack the blaze from outside.

At 7 a.m., after chipping chunks of ice and snow from an air tank used earlier in the morning, Hebron firefighter Chuck Hall told his chief: “(The fire is) freaking huge … what’s left of it anyway.”

A half-hour later, the outside walls of the home were still standing, but there was a gaping hole in the roof and the interior had been consumed by flames, which were shooting through the roof until well after 8:30 a.m.

Tanker trucks from Paris, Hebron, Sumner, Minot, Livermore, Livermore Falls, Leeds, Woodstock, Turner, Norway and West Paris ferried water from Buckfield Village, lined up to dump their loads into a fire pool set up at the end of the Starbirds’ road because the nearby dry hydrant was buried under piles of snow.

At the height of the fire, hoses were blasting up to 750 gallons of water a minute and the smoke and steam rising from it could be seen for miles.

Ash from the house was carried up in the plume and was observed dropping hundreds of yards from the home.

Firefighters managed to pull a number of tires, bikes, children’s toys, tools and a gas grill out of the two-car garage, but the rest of the property is destroyed.

In addition to departments responding for mutual aid, members of the Oxford Fire Department helped man the fire and Buckfield Rescue and the Salvation Army provided support at the scene. Responders remained at the property to cool the fire until 3:25 p.m., and were called back around 9 p.m. when the blaze rekindled in the rubble.

The home, constructed in 2003, is assessed at $192,100 for tax purposes, which is about 72 percent of its market value, according to the Buckfield Town Office. The house was insured and the family is believed to be staying with relatives.