SWANVILLE, Maine — A group of young teenagers accidentally started a fire that consumed about 35 acres of grass and brush in the town of Swanville on Sunday, according to fire officials.
The three teenage boys evidently had been using fire to try to thaw ice around a container, but the dry grass around the frozen container ignited and raged out of control, Belfast Fire Chief Jim Richards said Tuesday. The youths are not facing charges related to the weekend fire that took about 30 firefighters nearly five hours to extinguish.
“They felt bad. They knew they’d made a stupid mistake,” Richards said. “They helped the guys fight the fire for three hours.”
The wildfire call came in about 10:15 a.m. on Sunday, he said. About 21 firefighters from the Belfast Fire Department, eight or so from Morrill and one from Thorndike who was driving by and stopped to see if he could help ended up responding to the fire. The blaze was located off Oak Hill Road near the northwest corner of Hurds Pond. Richards said that the fire was about half a mile from the road, and that the firefighters used roughly 4,000 feet of hose to get water from the tanker trucks to the scene.
“It was a good-sized chunk of land,” he said.
No firefighters were injured while extinguishing the blaze, which was put out by about 3 p.m.
“Everything worked good, and the guys did their usual good job,” Richards said.