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Blaze levels barn
Wednesday, Jan. 7, 2009
 Click here to enlarge this photo Staff photos by JESSE YEATMAN
A storage barn next to the Historic St. Mary's City visitor's center burned to the ground late Friday morning, destroying farm equipment owned by Historic St. Mary's City and some chickens inside.
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Heat lamps used to warm chickens in a barn at Historic St. Mary's City caused a fire last Friday that burned the barn to the ground and destroyed tens of thousands of dollars worth of mowers and other equipment.
A maintenance worker spotted the fire a little after 11 a.m. on Friday, Jan. 2, starting in a corner where the chickens were being housed for the winter in the barn near the Historic St. Mary's City visitors center off Rosecroft Road.
Fire officials blamed the blaze on heat lamps being used to warm the nine chickens, which are part of the plantation exhibit at Historic St. Mary's City. The chickens were moved to the barn when the season ended in late November or early December, museum officials said.
In the past, cows from the exhibit had been kept in the barn over the winter, said Regina Faden, executive director of Historic St. Mary's City, but were housed elsewhere this winter.
Firefighters worked on the burning barn for nearly four hours dousing beams and other debris as well as extinguishing small brush fires resulting from blowing embers.
"She was pretty much fully involved when we got there," said Francis Raley, chief of Ridge Volunteer Fire Department. Volunteers from Bay District and the 2nd District aided in fighting the blaze, as did paid firefighters from the nearby Navy base at Webster Field in St. Inigoes.
The firefighters blitzed the fire with everything they had when they first arrived, Raley said.
However, they soon began to run short of water and called in other tanker trucks, the chief said. The firefighters began to use a deck cannon from atop one of the trucks, but that uses so much water that it began to deplete their limited supply.
"We ended up going back to hand lines," Raley said.
A fire hydrant nearby would have helped somewhat, but because the barn was fully engulfed when the firemen arrived it could not have been enough to save the structure, he said.
Still, "it definitely would have been good" to have had a hydrant nearby, he said.
Next door at St. Mary's College of Maryland there are hydrants located throughout campus.
But on the Historic St. Mary's City side of Route 5, except for near the old State House, there aren't hydrants available, Raley said.
Instead, some of the trucks refilled at the college maintenance building across Route 5. By using "tanker shuttles," the firemen were able to keep a steady supply of water through four hours of first snow and then rain.
Faden said the barn itself "is not architecturally significant," but that it did serve as the main storage area for the historic city's equipment.
"There was all sorts of landscaping equipment in there, lawn mowers, trimmers, rakes," Faden said.
Including two new mowers that were destroyed, there was "at least $50,000 worth of equipment," she said.
That is in addition to about $100,000 for the barn, which dates back to when the area was a working farm in the last century.
There was also new fiber- optic cable and conduits valued at less than $5,000 being stored in the barn.
The cable was going to run underground from the city to the college to facilitate in sharing and storing information from the historic city, Faden said.
She said the city will file a report to the state about what was lost in the fire and the state will pay for replacements up front but require the Historic St. Mary's City Commission to repay out of its operating budget.
The barn that burned was within several hundred feet of the historic city's visitors center, which looks like a large blue barn along with some outbuildings.
The visitors center houses historical pieces from the city as well as a host of exhibits. It was not damaged in the fire.
