Firefighters are battling a four-alarm fire at a former packaging company in Torrington Monday morning.
The fire is at the old Smurfit-Stone container factory on Summer Street and the Torrington Fire Department received the call around 5 a.m. The building collapsed in the blaze.
Cardboard boxes were made there until 2000, when Missouri-based Smurfit-Stone Container Corp. closed the Torrington factory in 2000, the Hartford Courant reports. The closure affected 113 people, according to the state WARN report issued in June 2000.
Fire started in the middle building of a five-building complex, at Daly Moving and Storage, officials said. The owner was on vacation when her business was destroyed.
The building was unoccupied but emergency crews had to cut power to the surrounding neighborhood as a precaution, leaving more than 500 people in Torrington without power on the first day since April where temperatures are expected to reach 90-degrees. Residents were being allowed back into their homes just before 8:30 a.m.
"There’s nothing left in this building, it’s completely destroyed, it has collapsed," Torrington Fire Chief John Field said.
Fire officials said a storage facility and some other business had been operating at the old factory.
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Ten firefighters responded initially. By the time the fire was out, 53 firefighters from from several departments were fighting the blaze. Four firefighters were taken to the hospital for heat exhaustion. No injuries are believed to be serious.
Officials from the state Department of Environmental Protection said the community is safe and some lab results are pending. No asbestos was found off the site. The department, however, did detect asbestos at the site but it was contained to the site, Donnell Thigpen, emergency response coordinator for the state DEP said.
Route 202 was closed in both directions at Albert Street and remained closed for hours.
Pauline Cunningham was driving by the scene Monday morning and said she had never seen anything like it. From the video she submitted, it appears that the entire top floor is engulfed. Crews at the scene said flames were visible from five miles away.
Smurfit-Stone has other facilities in Connecticut and recently announced that it would close the Portland plant in September. Ninety-three people work there.
What started the fire is not yet known.
