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‘One Hell
of a Stop’
Picking up the pieces from the fire that ravaged
Branford's central business district
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Business New Haven
3/9/1998
By: Susan Banfield
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Just before 6 p.m., closing time, on Wednesday, January 28, Palma and Vinnie Pascarelli and two workers of Castellon Bakery/Palma's Deli at 980 Main Street in Branford smelled “something stinking” coming from the basement. The two separate businesses shared the large first-floor space.
Then one of them saw a wisp of smoke clawing up an inside rear wall.
At the same time, Tony Castellon, son of one of the three brothers who have owned and operated the town-landmark bakery for more than 50 years, ran up the front stairs of the building to his second-floor apartment with his three children, Stephen, 11, Allison, ten, and Brian, four. They planned to celebrate Castellon's birthday with his fiancée, Cindy Ekblade, Tony's parents and his sister, Mary Lee.
The elder Castellons were driving to the scene with a large birthday pizza.
Mrs. Pascarelli called the Castellons at home. There was no answer.
One of the employees called 911.
The four on the first floor trooped out onto the street to await the firefighters.
No one went down into the basement to investigate. No one made any attempt to halt or put out whatever was smoldering on the floor below.
The building was ancient, all wood, built in the 1880s or '90s. No fire barriers had been built into the walls where it joined its neighbor, nor the building beyond that. They were row houses converted to commercial use long ago, before the advent of fire codes. (Connecticut did not have a state fire building code until 1971.)
In the basement of 980 Main were electrical wiring, compressor motors for the food coolers on the first floor, a hot water heater, a furnace - and fuel sources: plastic bags, paper wrappings, bakery supplies.
At 6:08 p.m., the first call came in to the communications center of the Branford Fire Department.
Deputy Fire Chief Ronald Mullen, incident commander, says “There was some discussion whether the fire department was needed.”
On the second floor, Allison told her father she smelled “something stinking” in the kitchen where she had set out her homework to finish before her father's birthday party. Castellon lit a stick of incense for her “to make the stink go away,” he recalls.
Stephen was in the living room framing a painting he had done to give to his mother.
Standing between living room and kitchen, Castellon saw “black smoke” licking up an interior wall where his kitchen range connected to wiring which led down into the basement.
He told his children to get out off the apartment immediately. He called 911. All he took were his daughter's homework and backpack. The painting was forgotten as he put on his four-year-old son's shoes.
The family left the building.
“And I watched my life burn away,” Castellon says.
The second call to the Branford Fire Station came almost immediately after the first.
By 6:11, three minutes after the first call, fire apparatus and firefighters, led by Mullen, were at the scene.
“We're not that far away,” Mullen says. “We were all at the station getting ready to have dinner, a beautiful turkey dinner. We never got to it.”
Upon arrival, Mullen noted that there were no flames visible and little smoke. Temperature above freezing. No wind.
He was not too concerned.
Mullen and his firefighters moved to the door on the first floor leading to the basement. He opened the door. Electric lights still burned. He saw a “light smoke haze.”
“But all of a sudden the smoke got dark,” he says, “and then it was dark and hot, which was the fire coming up the stairway - the stairwell became a fire tunnel, a chimney.”
Within 30 seconds, the smoke and heat had intensified to three times its original strength.
Such a condition is not unusual in an unchecked fire, Mullen knew. He had learned in his professional studies that a free fire can triple, even quadruple, in size and intensity for every minute it burns, if it finds “food” - firefighters call it the fuel load.
This fire found everything it was looking for.
Mullen took his glove off and felt the floor. It was hot. He told the firefighters behind him who were running the hose line in, to get out. “I was expecting the floor to collapse and we'd end up in the basement,” he says.
If there were smoke detectors in the bakery where the fire began, no witness reported an alarm being sounded. There was no sprinkler system.
“Most of the fire codes today are a result of large-loss fires,” Mullen says. “Good judgment, you know, comes from bad experience.”
Back on the street, he sent out a call for additional help.
There was an alley to the right of the building, and a fire escape. Mullen sent four of his men up the fire escape in the alley to evacuate any occupants inside.
As the firefighters mounted the fire escape, the temperature dropped sharply and a wind leapt up.
“Out of nowhere,” says Mullen, “a 25- to 35-mile-an-hour wind. It was amazing.”
The fire doors at the top of the escape ladder were locked. Cindy Ekblade, Castellon's fiancée, had arrived. Frantic, she was trying to enter via the fire escape to find Castellon and the children. She opened a door for the firefighters. They sent her down to the street. The firefighters ran in to search for anyone left inside.
Mullen, in the alley, looked in the first-floor windows and saw great balls of flames, wild fire “rolling, curling, swirling,” he says.
The fire had devoured the basement in minutes. And it had already captured and was consuming the first floor.
Mullen told his men they had half a minute to search and rescue, if necessary.
But within 15 seconds Mullen saw that the fire had swallowed the entire first floor and was rampaging on the second.
The flames were not going up, the way a normal fire burns. The wind, close to gale force now, bent the fire horizontally, so that smoke and heat were blowing in three directions: to the building beyond the alley; across Main Street to the Green and Town Hall; and back toward the Baptist Church the other side of Main Street.
The Branford fire station communication center was getting calls that the fire was sparking on houses three-quarters of a mile away.
Beneath the firefighters, the fire was still invisible to the eye. They did not know how large, how wild, how powerful the fire had grown, so fast.
“Get out now!” commanded Mullen. On their portable radios, the men heard.
They all got out.
The building burned in its entirety, and the next one and the next, but they burned with no loss of life.
The operation now became a defensive-only battle from the street.
Mullen had called for help from eight towns: Branford, North Branford, Madison, Guilford and the “Havens” - New Haven, East Haven, North Haven, West Haven - professional and volunteer.
All the towns responded.
One firefighter told Mullen after, “We could see the flames from the Q-Bridge” miles away on I-95.
Radio frequencies of the different towns vary, so Mullen could not communicate with the other towns' firefighters; neither could they communicate with one another. But with Mullen as incident commander, all found a way to fight the fire together.
They stopped the fire before the fourth building went.
“If we hadn't caught the fire where we did,” says Mullen, “we'd probably have lost the whole street. It was one hell of a stop.”
No lives were lost.
Three buildings were rubble.
Eight apartments and ten businesses were burned out.
Some town lamp posts were destroyed, along with some sections of sidewalk.
The Baptist Church suffered only minor smoke damage.
One hell of a stop.
The firefighters stayed on the job more than 24 hours.
“The fire wasn't completely out until the following night,” Mullen says. “There were little spot fires, little pockets. The water company told me we used over four million gallons of water.”
There were 26 fire engines at the scene, six ladder trucks, three rescue vehicles, two command vehicles, ten ambulances.
The estimated immediate mercantile loss is $3 million, according to Mullen. But the total cost is higher. There are so-called ripple costs. Adjacent businesses lose money as customers avoid the area, employees out of work have no money to spend. Businesses operating on too thin a margin of savings don't come back.
But these buildings will be rebuilt. These businesses will come back. These homeless tenants will find new apartments, new homes, fresh lives. Some are already well on their way.
The people of Branford have pitched in to help them do that.
One who responded immediately was First Selectman Anthony (Unk) DaRos. He arrived at the fire scene just as the second-alarm fire engine did. He opened Town Hall to give temporary shelter to the victims of the fire and tired firefighters.
He called Patricia Andriole, director of the Branford Counseling Center, to come help if she could.
Andriole was getting ready to watch her son, David Andriole, debut on the television show, Beverly Hills, 90210.
“I taped the show instead,” she says.
She drove to the scene and stayed, working late into the night finding clothes, food and shelter for the newly homeless.
The four who had nowhere to go were placed in the Branford Motel. Echlin Inc. paid for their stay. Clothing for all who needed it was donated by Wal-Mart. The Red Cross helped with money and food vouchers.
DaRos said his immediate concerns, after the fire, were two.
“First, the victims. Second, the town. Get the power restored, the gas, the water. Get the street open for the other businesses in the area - we don't want them to suffer. Get the street cleaned up fast, all the rubble and debris.”
Asbestos on the site was a problem. DaRos was able to coordinate with the insurance companies so that the three buildings could be handled as one claim, with each building's insurer paying for a third of the cleanup costs.
If any owner was underinsured, that owner would be responsible for his damage.
“The cost of asbestos removal is astronomical,” says DaRos. “Simple demolition is not a big deal, but asbestos has to be removed a certain way, according to code, and it's in the roofing material, the flooring, the soft pipe covering. Asbestos has to be bagged, each piece, and sent to a lab in Maryland. Other than that, the buildings were fairly clean.”
DaRos asked the fire department to keep a fire hose at the scene, hosing down the asbestos every day so the wind would not blow it and contaminate the town.
The lots where buildings will be rebuilt will remain as holes with barricades around them until the owners and the insurance companies decide what kind of new structures will be erected.
If a property owner decides not to rebuild, the town will fill in the hole for safety reasons, until the lot is sold, DaRos says.
“You won't see the same kind of buildings as used to be,” DaRos says. “They were beautiful, each one unique. But the new ones will be nice-looking buildings.”
The Branford town center underwent a revitalization effort about ten years ago. The town center is attractive, vibrant and bustling, DaRos says, and the people of Branford are proud of it.
“And now we have this” DaRos says. “We've lost ten percent of our business area. Well, it's an opportunity to finish what we started. We're going to get it all back - and more.”
Branford State Reps. Patricia Widlitz, Peter Panaroni and Michael Lawlor were all in DaRos' office at 9 a.m. the Friday after the fire, pledging their help.
U.S. Sen. Christopher Dodd and U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-3) were at the fire site on Friday. DeLauro brought with her an emissary from the U.S. Small Business Administration to view the remains of the fire in person. As BNH went to press, the SBA had already approved loans up to $1.5 million at four percent for all the businesses affected.
Hoyt's Cinema, having its grand opening in Branford on Friday night after the fire, gave DaRos a check for $2,500 “to put wherever it was needed,” DaRos says.
Stop & Shop donated food.
Restaurants in town gave gift certificates to those who needed meals.
A seven-year-old boy emptied his piggy bank and gave the fire chief five one-dollar bills for the homeless.
DaRos asked BNH to let him thank publicly all the other towns' mayors for allowing their apparatus and firefighters to come up to Branford.
“I've been involved with firefighting for 33 years,” he says, “so I know a good job when I see one. And they did a fantastic job.”
Tim Brockett, co-chairman of the Branford Center Merchants, helped set up a fund for victims of the fire.
The Castellon brothers, owners of 980 Main, do not know yet if or when they will rebuild the building. Their bakery will probably not come back.
Palma and Vinnie Pascarelli, who owned Palma's Deli, will reopen their business as soon as possible, and hope it will be in the new Castellon building.
Al Vacco, who owns the building at 970 Main, plans to rebuild. His business, Hair On Main, will be back.
Joe Zurkus of Accu Lock & Safe was unavailable for comment on his plans.
Robin Mangs of Swish, 988 Main, will reopen her business in Branford at, or near, the same location, she hopes.
Jayne Crowley and Janet Carlin, who owned J.C. Glassworks at 990 Main, will reopen their business on or around April 1 at 1098 Main. Crowley said the “tremendous response of the people of Branford gave us the oomph to come back.”
Dan Nowland, who owns Page's Sport Shop at 1000 Main, is still in business notwithstanding substantial fire damage, and will hold a salvage sale. After that, according to his partner, Starr Marino, their plans are uncertain.
Contributions to help the victims of this fire can be mailed to: Branford Community Foundation Homeless Fire Fund, P.O. Box 462, Branford 06405.
“History was lost,” says deputy fire chief Mullen, “but history will be made. Branford - it's a wonderful town.”
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