We’re fundraising to support the newsroom this spring. But on this page let’s take a break. Here are some efforts raising funds to support victims of the Searsmont fire. We hope you’ll consider a gift to support the families.
The Robbins Lumber mill is back up and running. The TV news vans are gone. The federal investigators who filled the town’s general store at lunchtime for more than a week have returned home.
But nothing is back to normal in Searsmont, says Tammy Rector, co-owner of the Fraternity Village General Store in the center of town. One firefighter, 27-year-old Andrew Cross, was killed and 8 of the 12 people injured in the May 15 fire and explosion at the mill are still getting treatment at Boston and Portland hospitals, including 3 members of the Robbins family.
“It’s such a tragedy. Nothing like this has ever happened here,” she said. “And we don’t know how exactly to deal with that.”
It’s not clear yet what the long-term effects on the town will be, Rector said. Searsmont, which has a population of 1,400 people, has long been known as the home of Robbins Lumber, which employs more than 100 people and has roots in the town that extend back nearly 150 years. In any place where there is a major employer that dominates the economic lives of local residents, the fates of a company and a town can seem inseparable.
And Searsmont is not the first town in Maine to wonder what the impact of a catastrophe or some other dire economic development for a major local company might have on its future.
In the early-to-mid 1900s, the slow demise of the sardine industry shuttered canneries that anchored several towns along the coast, while toward the end of that century Maine’s shoe industry contracted sharply, shedding thousands of jobs, mostly in central Maine.
And in the early 2000s the downturn of the paper industry resulted in the permanent closure of mills in Bucksport, Brewer, Lincoln, Madison, Millinocket and East Millinocket. State and municipal officials have sought new large-scale employers to fill the gaps left behind, but so far only the sites in Brewer and Madison have been significantly revived.
In Searsmont, no one is predicting the demise of Robbins Lumber — a family owned and operated company that last week posted on its website that it is “fully operational, ready for your orders, and [looking] forward to continuing to meet your Eastern White Pine needs.”
Still, the trauma of the explosion, the death of Cross and the severe injuries suffered by several people will have a lasting effect on both the mill and the town. Robbins Lumber workers still come into the general store every day as they did before, but they’re not the same, Rector said.
“The suffering continues,” she said. “It will be a long recovery for everybody.”
Searsmont feels in certain ways like a throwback to a gentler era – from the red general store where people linger to chat, to the annual chicken barbecue to the rolling hills and white steepled church in the village center. After more than a century in operation, the low-lying Robbins mill is not that visible from neighboring properties but nonetheless still anchors the town – an increasing rarity as factories making goods like paper and textiles have disappeared from many of the communities that grew up around them.
Searsmont isn’t a company town in the same way that some larger towns like Jay or Bucksport, which were largely defined by and dependent on their mills, but the influence of the Robbins family and its business is everywhere. The Robbins family donated land for the fire station, ball field and the town’s community building – a handsome, shingled structure that houses the town office, historical society and public library and was built with lumber donated by the Robbins family. After the May 15 fire, it became the command center for the dozens of state and federal investigators who poured into town to try to determine the cause of the blaze.
The fire at Robbins Lumber began in part of the mill where wood chips are bagged and then spread to a nearby silo, where investigators say dust rapidly ignited, causing the silo to explode. Lumber mills and other wood processing facilities are ‘inherently prone’ to fires and explosions, according to the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
Firefighters from Searsmont and several other surrounding towns were at the mill trying to extinguish the flames when sawdust inside the silo burst into flame, causing the silo to shoot into the air before falling back to earth in a fireball that engulfed people and torched firefighting vehicles nearby.
Brothers Jim A. and Alden Robbins, who with their sister Catherine Robbins-Halsted are the fifth generation of the family to run the company, are among those badly injured in the explosion. The brothers and Lily Robbins, an EMT who responded to the fire and is Alden’s daughter, all remain in critical condition at Mass General Hospital in Boston.
Last week, after investigators examined the aftermath and debris was cleaned up, the mill resumed full operations, shifting some of its work to sites elsewhere in the state and building a temporary warehouse at the Searsmont mill, company officials said.
Other large industrial employers elsewhere in Maine have had similar accidents in the past — though without significant injury — but were unable to recover.
In 2013, a boiler explosion at Lincoln Tissue and Paper in the town of Lincoln eventually led to that company filing for bankruptcy. Seven years later, a digester at the Androscoggin Mill in Jay also exploded and, though that mill fought to keep operating without the digester for another couple of years, it too ended up shutting down, eliminating the mill’s 230 jobs.
But in those cases, the mills were owned by companies or executives from out of state, who only came to Maine because of their investments and then left again when those investments ran dry.
In Searsmont, this isn’t going to happen, residents said. Everyone in town is connected to the Robbins family and their company in some way, Rector said.
“The Robbins family really is Searsmont,” Rector said.
The family opened its first sawmill, a water-powered one, on the St. George River in 1881 when it began milling white pine. Since then, it’s grown to become one of the largest white pine suppliers in the Northeast, a major employer in the region, and a central player in the life of the Searsmont community.
The company employs 115 people, according to its website, and buys logs from at least a hundred independent loggers, according to documents from the town of Searsmont. It owns more than 3,000 acres of land in town – much of it forest – and pays Searsmont more than $140,000 in property taxes each year, according to town records.
The town’s economic health is tied to the company’s economic health, and the community overwhelmingly supports the company, said Christopher Staples, a longtime select board member.
“Ninety percent of the people in this town love having the mill there,” Staples said. The ones who don’t come from somewhere else and don’t like the smoke or the noise, he said.
BDN writer Elizabeth Walztoni contributed to this report.