Serving Whitman County since 1877
Serving Whitman County since 1877
Fire aftermath
Following the fire last week that destroyed an 1889 building in Palouse – on the night before the grand opening of a bar and restaurant on the ground floor – the cause remains to be determined.
A Certified Fire Investigator (CFI) from the Spokane Field Office of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms visited the site April 8 to assist the Palouse Fire Department.
“It’s an ongoing investigation,” said Paul Canup, Resident Agent in Charge, ATF Spokane Field Office. “We have one agent assisting in the area of cause and origin of the fire.”
The expected time frame for a conclusion is hard to say, indicated Brian Bennett, Public Information Officer, ATF Seattle Field Division.
“He (CFI) hasn’t made a determination. Sometimes it can take weeks, months, a year,” he said. “There is no usual. There’s too many variables.”
The fire falls under the jurisdiction of the ATF because it affects interstate commerce.
“You could have a 7-Eleven that sells Cheetos that were made in Missouri and you’d have interstate commerce,” Bennett said.
Overall, Palouse Fire Chief Mike Bagott estimates that something electrical caused the fire.
“That still seems the most likely culprit,” he said. “Nothing else fits on the face of things. I would be surprised if they make any determination beyond accidental.”
He said that a fault in an electrical wire can sit undetermined for years. The insulation on wire has to break down on it where it can short, which is when electricity takes a path outside its intended route.
“It could be a spark or an arc is a better way to describe it,” Bagott said. “It arcs over to a nail and the subsequent heat from the nail ultimately starts the fire.”
Overall, he said the opportunity to deliberately set this fire would have been limited.
“If somebody did this intentionally, they went an awfully long way to cover their tracks,” Bagott said.
He explained this, suggesting that if the fire was set, someone would have had to have a key to get into the padlocked door to a stairwell — since the second floor back room was apparently inaccessible from the ground floor.
The second floor rear of the building is where smoke was first seen.
As far as new electrical wiring for the remodeling of the bar and restaurant area, owner Adam Barron, a contractor, did it himself along with some volunteer help.
According to the Washington Department of Labor and Industries, electrical inspections on the new work was incomplete.
“I was in such a hurry to get open I did not call for the final inspection,” Barron said.
“Just the final electrical inspection was the last one to be done.”
He said he performed no electrical work on the second floor.
“Nothing that I did had anything to do with the upstairs. Not anything had been touched,” he said.
Attempts to stop the fire
The 911 call came at 3:50 a.m. from Dan Garceau, a Palouse resident driving home from a night shift across the stateline.
Coming west up Main Street from Highway 272, past the Community Center and McLeod’s Market, Garceau noticed a haze at the back of the building that housed the new restaurant and bar.
Seeing thick, gray smoke pushing out horizontally in a lazy haze by the back of the building, he turned in to look to be sure it wasn’t fog. What he saw, Chief Bagott said, was smoke oozing out of cracks in the bricks and around windows.
“There wasn’t any indication of any fire, really any smoke coming out of the lower portion,” he said of when the fire department arrived on scene.
The first firefighter there, Marc VanHarn, a 12-year veteran who lives just down the block, ran up the sidewalk, turned the corner and saw the smoke coming from the back of the building.
“It was at that point that I just assumed I was gonna be homeless,” VanHarn said. “In discussion with the (fire) department of any downtown fire we assumed we’d lose the whole block.”
He ran back to get in his car to drive to the fire station up the hill. “The second I turned into firefighter mode, I didn’t think about my house.”
As a siren sounded over the town summoning other volunteer firefighters and waking up residents, back at VanHarn’s apartment – above his Vintage Velocity Hot Rods business – his wife and a couple staying with them hurried to move motorcycles and cars out of the shop.
At the scene of the smoke, a stairwell leading to the building’s second floor had a padlocked door on the east side toward Heritage Park. This is where, soon after Bagott and his crew got there, firefighters Scott Beeson and Wil Edwards entered the building with a hose to go up to see if the fire could be fought from the inside.
At the top of the stairs, they turned left toward the back of the building and quickly hit smoke and heat.
Then they acted on their training.
“You open up a short burst and if the water turns to steam, it gives you an indication you’ve got extremely high heat at the ceiling,” Bagott said.
Water converts to steam at a ratio of one cubic foot of water to 1,700 cubic feet of steam.
“They did have water return on them but also had the heat come down on them from the steam conversion,” Bagott said.
Bad feeling
Once Beeson and Edwards were turned away, the chief’s initial instinct about the fire held.
“I had a pretty bad feeling about it before we even got there,” he said, referring to the fact it was an old building and the inevitable longer response time from outlying departments since it was the middle of the night.
He suspects the fire was burning for some time before Garceau saw the smoke.
“It could’ve been going for a half hour, 45 minutes. That’s all conjecture and guess,” Bagott said.
After the stairwell attempt, other firefighters took a 250-300 gallon per-minute hose and set up a ladder at the back of the building. They climbed to a second floor window in the old meeting hall above the former post office, broke the glass and sprayed at smoke inside.
In roughly 10 minutes, they saw the first flames coming from the roof above.
“The focus had to shift to saving everything else on the block,” Bagott said.
The flames spread quickly from the back of the roof across it.
“Once it was through the roof it was pretty obvious that there was not gonna be any chance to save the building,” the chief said.
This was because, since firefighters couldn’t get access to shoot water on the source of the fire – byway of the stairway or through the window on the second floor in back – all they were doing was spraying water on the extending flames.
“It’s attacking the symptoms as opposed to the cause,” Bagott said.
In turn, firemen and women then took hoses and got into position on Main Street in pairs, shooting water from five lines, up onto the roofs of the rest of the block.
As the fire burned and heat spread, contained in the original building, the mortar and internal structure that kept its brick walls in place weakened.
“It’s not a failure of the bricks but a failure of everything else keeping them in place,” Bagott said.
By morning light, the building had burned to the ground.
Overall, Bagott suggested that fighting this fire will make his department better.
“For us it was a good learning experience,” he said, pointing to the biggest lesson as getting water onto the other buildings quicker.
The Palouse Fire Department cleared the scene at approximately 7 p.m. April 8.
For more on the fire see pages 3 and 4.
Garth Meyer is a former Whitman County Gazette reporter.
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