Burning Bangor
Main Street in Bangor hasn’t had too much luck lately in terms of fire. About a week and a half ago, a welding accident caused a complete loss of inventory at the Shaw’s supermarket on south Main Street. Thursday’s fire at the Masonic Building next to the Maine Discovery Museum was just another case of how fire can strike anywhere twice.
If you don’t know Bangor, you have to understand something. There are basically five Interstate 95 exits in the city: 45 through 49. Take a right at any exit from 46 to 49 coming from the south and you’ll end up within a mile of where all the other exits go: smack dab in the middle of downtown Bangor, on either Main Street or State Street. Bangor has many popular sections, but Main Street acts as the hub - the true “downtown”.
I went down to Main Street at dusk. It’s a really eerie scene; as I parked my car, fire trucks roared by to head to another alarm. Police blocked off all of Main Street from Union to State, so I walked behind Pickering Square up to State and then around and up Columbia Street. Even the BAT bus system had to move operations from Pickering Square to right outside the Bangor Savings Bank on Main Street. After a while, I realized that people were allowed on Main Street. I went down and took a few pictures.
The building smoldered for hours after the fire on Thursday night, and the firefighters hosed the building down; the sub-zero temperatures, however, caused the building to develop a thick cover of ice that still remains. Kevin Bennett took an amazing picture for the BDN article that ran in today’s paper.
