BRUNSWICK, Maine — Kamal Dahal woke up in the early hours of Sunday morning because he couldn’t breathe. Realizing his room was full of smoke, he roused his friends, Koshor Khatiwada and Madhav Dahal, and the three ran from their apartment at 45 Maine St. into a cold, rainy night.
Only then, Dahal said, did they hear a fire alarm and realize their building was ablaze.
Across the street, Shere Punjab, an Indian restaurant where the three men work, remained closed on Sunday. Owner Prakash Gyawali, who rents Dahal’s apartment for him, said the “grief” was overwhelming.
Since Sunday morning, the four men have perched at the restaurant’s windows, first watching as firefighters flooded the debris from tower trucks, and then on Tuesday as investigators sifted through crumbled bricks and blackened boards.
Bleary-eyed, they said they had lost everything, including Social Security cards, passports and two days of receipts from the restaurant. Gyawali does not think he had renter’s insurance.
Reported at 2:30 a.m. Sunday, the three-alarm inferno that destroyed the landmark building at the corner of Maine and Mason streets drew more than 100 firefighters from 10 different departments.
At one point, on-site commanders ordered firefighters to evacuate the building after flames exploded out of the windows. One resident was rescued from a third-floor window.
On Sunday afternoon, the gutted building was demolished after public safety officials deemed it a hazard.
Asleep in their third-floor apartment, Robert Lombardi and Angie Bussell did hear the fire alarm Sunday morning, but Lombardi said he ignored it.
“Then I smelled burning wood,” he said Tuesday.
As he told Bussell to put on her sneakers, Brunswick police officers banged on their apartment door.
“We were only able to leave with the clothes on our backs,” Lombardi said. “I’m still discombobulated.”
Now they’re staying at the Comfort Inn on Pleasant Street, but vouchers from the American Red Cross are only good until Thursday. After that, they said, they’re not sure where they’ll go.
Beneath the apartments, Sunday’s flames also incinerated five businesses, along with “a very close,” familylike relationship among the business owners and their families.
EZ AuctioNet owner Marita Wallace was in Indiana on Sunday when she received a text message asking her, “Is 45 Maine Street near you?”
“I said, ‘Uh, it is me,’” Wallace said Tuesday. When she returned home on Monday, Wallace saw that her business — which lists and sells items on eBay — was gone, along with more than 7,500 items stored for the business.
Throughout the day Tuesday, Wallace — with a group of friends and employees — hovered outside police barricades and in Frosty’s Donuts, watching investigators dig and hoping to catch a glimpse of merchandise, including expensive discontinued and hard-to-find beauty products. Many had been stored in a back room that appeared, from a back parking lot, to have been largely untouched.
“The nail polish should be OK,” she said. “I hope we can go through the debris.”
Perhaps most difficult to absorb was the loss of a hard drive containing contact information for the customers who had listed auction items with her, Wallace said. Now she has no way to let them know what happened.
When the fire broke out, Dominic Vella was at his home next door, above Blessings, the business he and his wife operate.
Blessings, and the entire building that houses the business, escaped the blaze largely intact, save for some stuck doors, perhaps some foundation shifting due to the weight of a brick wall leaning against it — and a starfish, which fell off the wall into a toilet.
But as Vella and his wife watched from a rear parking lot on Mason Street, their friends’ businesses and their way of life were lost.
“We were a very close group of people,” he said Tuesday morning on the sidewalk outside Blessings, just behind the yellow police tape. “My grandchildren and their children all played in [a room in] the back of Wildflours [a gluten-free bakery destroyed by the fire], and we had become friends. All the kids played in the sandbox” in a courtyard behind the buildings, where on Tuesday afternoon an empty playhouse sat near two unused Adirondack chairs.
Last summer, the business owners worked together installing flower baskets outside their storefronts, and Vella said they had spoken to landlord Sue Ranger about putting up new awnings “to liven up” the corner.
Now, new setback mandates and Americans With Disabilities Act regulations make rebuilding the structure as it was before seem unlikely, he said.
“We will never have what we had before,” Vella said. “It’s all changed now.”
Phil and Becky Doughty ran their business, Communication Network, in the building for 14 years. Their children spent many hours playing there, Phil Doughty said Tuesday, and when it burned, they lost their second home.
Their grief was evident Tuesday as the family watched investigators sift through mounds of rubble. Somewhere in there is the only copy of their wedding video, he said.
Doughty also lamented the loss of “this big happy family” forming among the business owners.
“That’s all gone,” he said.
Kelley Hughes of Wildflours Gluten-free Bakery said that although she lost everything in the fire, she’s determined to reopen. However, she plans to give herself a couple of weeks to “let the rubble settle, literally,” before she makes any decisions.
Tuesday afternoon, a commercial real estate broker approached Hughes in her Mason Street parking lot, suggesting buildings for lease in Freeport. Hughes accepted his card, thanked him politely, then turned away.
“That’s the third one,” she said.
Despite the financial loss — which no one has yet calculated — and the visible heartache, former residents and business owners at the old Firestone building said Tuesday that the outpouring of support from the Brunswick community has been comforting.
Hughes was touched that hours after the flames were doused, Brunswick firefighters salvaged the Wildflours Bakery sign in “pristine” condition.
The business community has also offered immeasurable support, owners said, including office space and equipment.
“They’re so at the ready,” Hughes said. “Paul [Harrison] from Little Dog said, ‘Whenever you’re ready,’ … and the Broadway Deli offered kitchen space, and the Barn Door Cafe and Cafe Creme called to say, ‘What can we do?’ The outpouring is just overwhelming in just a really good way.”
As of Tuesday evening, hundreds of comments on Wildflours’ Facebook page offered condolences and even talk of fundraisers.
Wallace of EZ AuctioNet said the Brunswick Downtown Association contacted her to offer a phone and business equipment whenever she’s ready to set up shop again.
“Brunswick is a community with a great big heart, and they will step up to the need,” BDA board chairwoman Dee Perry said Tuesday. The BDA contacted business owners and members of the community to “get the word out” about those affected by the fire, and Perry said space and equipment was offered.
“We’d all want that, if we had that happen to us,” she said.
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