£50,000 BLAZE AT MOUNT EDEN

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 223, 9 December 1927, Page 1

£50,000 BLAZE AT MOUNT EDEN

SPECTACULAR FIRE

Joinery Mill Burned LONG FIGHT WITH FLAMES Touch-and-Go For Timber Yards FIREMEN and helpers had narrow escapes this morning in the course of a spectacular fire which destroyed Henderson and Pollard’s joinery mill, Enfield Street, Mount Eden. Mr. H. Pollard, whose firm suffered extremely heavy loss, just manged to jump clear when a high brick wall collapsed, and later, worn with the strain, was carried away in a state of complete exhaustion.

THE destruction of the factory and adjoining glass store raises Henderson and Pollard's loss to the total of many thousand pounds. Further heavy loss was incurred through the spread of the flames into stacks of seasoned timber, which burned like bonfires.

Elements of the gravest danger were presented by the fact that across a narrow railway siding was the large Mount Edpn factory of the Kauri Timber Company, while next door to Hen-

derson and Pollard’s property are buildings sheltering materials employed by the Colonial Ammunition Company in the manufacture of ammunition. In the heart of the flames a smokestack stood above a sizzling boiler, which added to the perils of the situation. Police patrolling the fringes of the crowd of onlookers warned them that the boiler might burst, but the warnings were little heeded, and the officers had to content themselves with clearing children from the danger zone. As it happened the boiler was full of water, and did not burst, but the danger had always been apparent, and in the early stages of the fire the son of an employee at the mill had made a desperate effort to reach the boiler and release the safety valves. His attempt was frustrated by the intense heat. POLICE RAISE ALARM

Freakish twists of circumstance decreed that the fire should develop after the nightwatchman, Mr. J. McLennan, had made his last rounds, Mr. McLennan starts duty at five o’clock in the evening, and goes off at 2 a.m.

When he left at two o’clock this morning there was no sign of fire, but three hours later the mill was ablaze from end to end. There was no one at all about when the flames were taking hold, and it is impossible to say exactly where it started. Mr. R. Johnston, a watchman in the adjacent mill of the Kauri Timber Company, was on duty all night, but saw nothing until the Henderson and Pollard building was well alight, and by that time the Mount Eden police had raised the alarm, sending calls to the city and Mount Eden brigades. Constables Breed and Taylor had been to the Mount Eden Railway Station. and were walking back along Boston Road, when they saw the glare of the fire, which was just bursting through the roof of Henderson and Pollard’s mill. The Mount Eden brigade was on the scene first, but had no chance of saving any part of the main mill. OTHER BUILDINGS MENACED The plant is in three sections, a main mill, consisting of three floors, including a low-level floor opening on to the railway. On the main Enfield Street frontage the building was of two storeys, and wooden. Alongside and connected with it' by fireproof doors, is a brick glass store and showroom, also of three floors, and across the road Is a big concrete building, of modern type, which houses additions to the plant. According to the theories of those who arrived early, the fire must have started in the ceiling, and it spread at an astounding speed. There is nothing to suggest that the engineroom or furnace had anything to do with the outbreak, and Mr. T. McDuff, engineer, states that all was in order in that part of the establishment when he left the evening before. He was a very astonished man when he came down at 5.45 this morning to get steam up as usual. The fire had then been raging an hour, and the main building was a heap of flaming ruins, from which rose the factory machinery, still in place, but red-hot. When the first firemen arrived the flames were racing through the building, and they made an impressive picture when they burst through the roof and windows. Later the roof collapsed with a crash, but by that time the anxiety of the firemen was directed elsewhere, for the building across the road was menaced, and was actually ablaze when Mr. G. I. Burnand and his son climbed to the top floor and extinguished, with buckets of water, flames that had already appeared in the lining of the roof, and along the wooden window frames. dwelling untenable

Such was the heat that dwellings on the opposite side of Enfield Street were scorching and smoking. One house, occupied by Mr. H. Smith, was ablaze at intervals, and its front was soon blistered and blackened'.

Firemen in the middle of the road kept water playing alternately on the house and on themselves, and only by a feat of fine endurance did they maintain their difficult post. Mr. Smith and his neighbours had begun to remove their furniture before the danger passed.

Telegraph poles were repeatedly flickering into flame, and several toppled when they had burned through. Meanwhile, despite the double thickness of fireproof doors, the fire had got into the brick glass store next to the burning mill, and the topmost floor contributed another sheet of flame to the fiery spectacle. Here were stored valued doors exhibited by the firm at the Dunedin Exhibition. They could not be saved, but large stocks of glass in the first and ground floors were preserved after strenuous efforts, in the course of which the building was flooded with immense quantities of water. Here, too, Mr. H. Pollard and several firemen narrowly escaped injury when the top of the rear wall collapsed on to the railway line. The serious phase of the fire was not passed at six o’clock, but in another half an hour the flames in the blazing timber stacks had been checked, and the Kauri Timber Company’s mill escaped other damage than the loss of