Fire destroyed about one third of a trailer at 2020 Friendship Rd. in Waldoboro on March 9.
The fire started around 2:45 p.m. when the owner, Kevin Brewer, 50, stepped out of his workshop to take a phone call, leaving a hot soldering iron unattended, Brewer said.
The workshop, a shed behind the house, burned to the ground, and the fire spread from there to the house, Brewer said.
Brewer lives alone and has no pets, and no one else was in the house when the fire started, he said. Brewer was not injured.
Fire crews from Waldoboro, Friendship, Warren and Nobleboro were able to contain the fire before it damaged the bedrooms, but the kitchen and living were heavily burned, said Waldoboro Fire Chief Paul Smeltzer.
The Union Fire Dept. covered the Waldoboro station, and Waldoboro EMS and the Waldoboro Police Dept. assisted.
“He just has the worst luck,” said Nancy Gordon, Brewer’s mother. “If there’s anything that can happen, it’ll happen to him.”
Brewer is currently on disability as a result of an accident on his boat in December 2004, Gordon said. The boat exploded in Rockland Harbor with Brewer on board after a fuel leak ignited, Brewer said.
When Brewer went back to the workshop after the phone call and saw that it was on fire, he immediately called the fire department, he said. He then tried to put the fire out on his own.
“I was scrambling,” he said. “But every time I’d get it in one place, it’d spark up someplace else.”
He watched the fuel tanks behind his house go up in flames; after the safety valve blew due to the heat, burning fuel was spraying into the air, he said.
Inside the house, the flames moved quickly, and spread into the walls, Brewer said. “Once I saw it go up into those eaves, I knew I wasn’t going to get it out,” he said.
There is an open cavity above the ceiling in most mobile homes, Smeltzer said. “Once the fire gets up there, it shoots across through the house,” he said. “My crews did a great job of getting up there and blowing it back so it didn’t spread too far.”
There is no reason to suspect that the fire is anything but an accident, and no further investigation will made into the source of the fire, Smeltzer said.
This isn’t the first fire to strike this part of Waldoboro, Gordon said.
“I’d swear this is just a fire zone,” she said. “I got burned out years ago, the neighbor got burned out, and now this.”
