Too close for comfort

At 11:30 a.m. yesterday firefighters were still dousing hot spots after a massive blaze on River Street in Ontonagon, Michigan.



A gaping hole is all that is left of six picturesque old false-front frame buildings that were a photographer's dream subject just last Friday.



Rear view of the destruction. The building in the center across the street looks OK, but its interior was gutted when flames leaped across the street. (Click on any of the photos for a slightly larger version.)

Notice the photographs posted below on Aug. 29, two high-dynamic-range-imaging shots of a block of buildings on River Street, the main drag of Ontonagon, Michigan, prototype of Porcupine City in my mystery novels. I had stopped there Friday morning to take pictures of a strip of six buildings with quaint false fronts.

Yesterday, not quite two days after those photos were taken, a massive fire erupted at 5 a.m. in one of the buildings, and by dawn all six of those structures had been totally consumed. (The "Nonesuch" building in the first picture survived. It lies a block farther up the street.)

Miraculously, no one was killed. One firefighter suffered burns on his hands; no one else was injured.

But Connie's Place, the town's charming, old-fashioned ice cream shop -- which the Lady Friend and I had frequented at least once a week this summer (and just nine hours before the fire broke out) -- is gone, and so is Ontonagon's only video store. Fortunately two friends of mine, the proprietors of a tax and bookkeeping service in one of the stricken buildings, managed to get in and rescue their computers before the blaze destroyed everything else.

Embers leaped from west to east across the main street, gutting an outdoors clothing store, but the firefighters kept further disaster at bay.

It's a wonder that the blaze didn't take more buildings -- most on the main drag are ancient wooden frame structures, and it has been a long, dry summer.

At this writing no official cause of the fire has been released.

Happily, this stouthearted town's Labor Day parade stepped off on time later in the day, although without the ritual fire engine, and traversed only half of River Street, bypassing the still smoking ruins. Whether the equipment needed cleaning and refurbishing or the volunteer firefighters were just too pooped to participate I don't know, but I saw at least one driving his pickup in the parade with his church's float in tow.

Many of the floats were emblazoned with "Thank You, Firemen" signs. In all, eight volunteer fire companies from towns elsewhere in the county came in to help the Ontonagon firefighters.

Ontonagon has a long memory of fire. In 1896 the Great Ontonagon Fire -- a conflagration that began at the Diamond Match Company -- nearly destroyed the town, and it never recovered fully. The downtown townscape, full of empty blocks never rebuilt after 1896, now looks as if it's missing still more teeth.

But Ontonagon survives still -- thanks to its own gutsy citizens.

See today's entry in my photography blog for another photo of a picturesque building that was lost.

See also a comment below from an Ontonagonian who with her husband led his elderly parents to safety from their apartment in a building next to one that caught fire.

September 4: See here for an aerial photograph of the ruins.