HARPSWELL

Firefighters traversed slippery roads to knock down a fire that badly damaged the kitchen of a home at 217 Gun Point Road on Tuesday night.

No one was hurt in the fire that was reported around 7:45 p.m.

The fire appears to have originated from a cooking stove, according to Orr’s and Bailey Islands Interim Fire Chief William Beazley, speaking at the scene at around 9:30 p.m.

Beazley said as the occupants were cooking something, “they unexpectedly turned around and the kitchen was on fire. They tried to extinguish it with a fire extinguisher, but at that point it was too much.”

Beazley said the house can definitely be rebuilt.

“We were very lucky that MC 2, the paramedic service in town, got here, got the owners out of the house and they closed the house up as they were leaving, which helped tremendously in keeping the fire from spreading,” Beazley said.

That gave firefighters some time to set up an attack and knock the fire down in the kitchen.

“It looks like there’s extensive smoke and heat damage throughout the entire house, but it looks like the actual fire damage was mostly in the kitchen area,” said Beazley.

Beazley didn’t have the name of the owners, who live out of state, but believes there was a family member at the house when the fire started.

According to the town’s online assessing database, the house is owned by Robert and Anne Teufel and is assessed at $597,700.

It could have been much worse, Beazley said, adding that the department was fortunate to have enough manpower qualified to fight the fire from inside the home.

“Once they made entry they knocked it down fairly quickly — I would say within the first ten minutes after being in the building,” Beazley said.

He believed firefighters had extinguished the fire in the building as of 9:30 p.m., at which point crews could be seen checking for remnants of the fire with a number of thermal imaging cameras.

Beazley didn’t expect to call the state fire marshal’s office given there was an eyewitness to the cooking fire, unless required by the home’s insurer.

Temperatures hovered around 38 degrees when the fire was reported, but that stretch of Gun Point Road was slippery with ice as firefighters tried to get to the scene to set up their water source. A plow truck from Goodall Landscaping responded to spread some sand and salt on the road, but it remained treacherous in the driveway and where several fire trucks were lined up near the driveway entrance.

The blaze drew firefighters from all three Harpswell fire departments and an engine from the Brunswick Fire Department, which also provided town coverage.

This is the second fire in Harpswell that damaged a home in as many months. A fire that started Dec. 28 destroyed a garage, along with several rare cars, on Orr’s Island, but no one was injured.

dmoore@timesrecord.com

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