The Elkins Fire Department and a host of other emergency personnel from throughout the area spent most of the day Monday battling the blaze at the building, which is owned by Hamer Pellet Fuel. The structure is located west of the intersection on 15th Street and Livingston Avenue.

“We didn’t actually have to stay all night, there are still a couple smoldering spots that we just can’t access until they decide what they are going to do as far as cleanup goes,” Elkins Fire Department Chief Steve Himes told The Inter-Mountain Tuesday. “There’s no danger of fire spreading and everything is well contained within the perimeter. There’s a little bit of fire deep seeded down in the debris, but if we would get some rain that would take care of it.”

Just before lunch time on Monday, emergency personnel were called to the scene of the fire.

Himes said no other structures in the neighborhood, other than a garage across the street, caught fire. “I’m going to assume (the garage) caught on fire because of some fly embers in the air or something like that,” he said. “We discovered it very early within the first 15 minutes of us being there and got it taken care of. I actually had guys walking the alley across the street for three blocks checking for any fire spread, because there was a lot of fire going there for a while.”

While streets are no longer blocked off at the site of the fire, police tape blocks off the entirety of the building as officials inspect the scene Tuesday.

As of late Tuesday afternoon the cause of the fire was still being investigated by the West Virginia State Fire Marshal’s Office.

   “None of (Hamer’s) manufacturing process was in there. It was pretty much used for storage for components of the main plant, lumber, and things like that,” Himes said. “None of the processing facility was contained in any of that old section. I don’t have a good inventory on the contents, just based on conversations with them (Hamer) of what they had in there.”

Himes said he was unsure if electricity was still hooked up in the building, which was in the process of being demolished. A permit for the demolition of property was issued by the City of Elkins on May 16. 

“I tried to make sure the water plant was in the loop that we were going to use quite a bit of water (fighting the fire),” Himes said. “I really don’t have a good assessment of that, but I’m going to say we used better than 500,000 gallons, because we were flowing big master streams. It wasn’t a lot of hand-line work, it was all big guns from a distance.”

Additional fire departments from Coalton, Belington and Beverly assisted at the scene, while the Buckhannon Fire Department covered the station for the EFD. The Randolph County Emergency Squad, Elkins City Police, and Randolph County Sheriff’s Office were also at the site. 

“I wasn’t sure what I was going to need, or where I was going to need it, so I tried to get enough help in here so that if something jumped off, we could handle it,” Himes said. “We were able to get the Sheriff’s Department Command Unit there and they set it up in the street so guys could go in there to get a break from the heat in the air conditioning. EMS was on scene throughout and kept a close watch on the guys. There wasn’t a lot of hard work because we couldn’t do much interior firefighting, but the heat and the gear and the work the guys were doing took it out of them pretty quick.”

First responders battling the blaze had to do so in temperatures over the 90 degree mark for most of the day.

Leia Chitester was working close by at Quick Cabinets of West Virginia on Ward Avenue when the fire erupted. 

“I was in the shop by myself and I could smell smoke through my respirator mask that I had on for work,” Chitester told The Inter-Mountain Tuesday. “We work with a lot of highly flammable stuff, so I immediately ran outside to make sure everything looked OK. And that’s when I saw that whole building was engulfed. It went up fast and when the fire department got there they seemed to have it contained, but then the wind blew and it picked right back up again.”

Chitester said the hot weather, smoke and the heat coming from the fire made the conditions in the nearby neighborhood almost unbearable on Monday. 

“I was about a half a block away and we were getting hit by soot,”she said. “You could feel the additional heat as hot as it was outside. My car is still covered in soot and ashes — our building was lucky, I don’t know how we survived it.”

Chitester said the scene at the fire was somewhat surreal on Monday.

“The fire (in the industrial building) was so hot that you could see it melting the metal high beams and the tin on the building,” Chitester said. “It was hot.”