Cigarette May Have Caused Sag Harbor Fire

A smoldering bucket of cigarette butts might have been to blame for an early-morning fire that grew into the region’s largest blaze in decades as it swept Sag Harbor’s Main Street on Friday, choking the downtown with acrid black smoke, gutting four buildings and destroying the iconic entrance to the Sag Harbor Cinema before firefighters from a dozen departments could extinguish the wind-driven flames.

In the days since, officials and village business owners have praised the bravery and skill of the hundreds of firefighters from throughout the East End who battled the blaze and kept it from spreading farther—and doing so in Friday’s freezing temperatures and stiff winds.

“Those firemen are the most amazing group of people—they saved our town,” said Lisa Field, owner of the Sag Harbor Variety Store, two doors down from where the flames were halted. “They might not get paid for it, but they are professionals. We owe them everything.”

Despite the rapid rate at which the fire spread, the intensity of the flames and the scale of the destruction, there were no injuries to residents or firefighters. One person sleeping in the second-floor apartment near where the fire started was evacuated by a police officer as the fire was spreading.

With four crews of firefighters, from Sag Harbor, Shelter Island, Southampton and East Hampton, hovering over the fire spraying water down from the towering arms of bucket trucks, the fire was finally brought under control by early afternoon, by which time it had spread through four buildings, gutting several businesses and the front entrance of the beloved movie theater.

While the theater itself was not badly damaged, except by smoke, the oft-photographed art-deco facade of the front entrance, with its neon-lit “Sag Harbor” sign, was left teetering over the street with no building attached. It was knocked down on Friday evening.

The fire was first noticed by Sag Harbor Village Police Officer Randy Steyert, who had stopped at SagTown Coffee shortly after 6 a.m. on Friday on his way to work. The fire had apparently just ignited on the back deck of an apartment in the building that housed Compass Realty.

“I’d been home with my sick son—he has a 104-degree fever, so I’d been up since 3:45 this morning, and I stopped to get a cup of coffee before I go to work,” Officer Steyert recalled on Friday afternoon. “I get out of my car, and I smelled wood burning and … I heard crackling, like fire on wet wood. And I went around the corner and, sure enough, there is a small second-floor deck … with a small fire on it.”

Officer Steyert, a Sag Harbor native in just his second year on the village force, called 911 and then bounded up the stairs to the apartment, pounding on the door until the tenant awoke. When the man, Michael Lynch, came to the door, he was groggy and startled by the smoke filling the apartment, he recalled. “I’m, like, ‘guy, we gotta go!’

“The apartment was filling with smoke. We hustled out of there, and I went to the front of the building to look … and by the time I went from the front to the back again, the whole deck was blazing.”

Once the fire found its way inside the structure, it spread quickly—engulfing the building that housed Compass Realty, formerly Scott Strough Real Estate Associates, then leaping to the south to the roof of the movie theater entrance—a wooden structure erected in a former alleyway between two much older buildings—then to the building to the north that housed SagTown, Collette Consignment and Matta clothing boutique, and then to a fourth building to the south of the movie theater, where it gutted the offices of Brown Harris Stevens Real Estate and two unoccupied apartments and caused extensive smoke damage in the neighboring Henry Lehr clothing store and the offices above.

“That fire, it wanted to move, it wanted to spread,” Sag Harbor Village Fire Chief Thomas Gardella said this week. “By the time I first got on scene, it had spread from the back of the [Compass] building to across the theater and was already burning on the second-floor apartment of the Brown Harris Stevens building. Before I even got out of the car, I knew we had a situation that was not typical.”

More than 150 firefighters from 16 fire departments and three ambulance corps from as far away as Center Moriches and Riverhead responded to the scene.

Chief Gardella said that very early on the firefighters determined that putting out what was already burning had to take a backseat to halting the advance of the flames. “We had to get ahead of it—we had to make a stand somewhere and stop it,” he recalled. “We made an initial push through the front of the theater, to try to put it out, but it was so hot in there—one of the thermal imaging cameras maxed out at 6,000 degrees—and one of our veteran guys just said, ‘We have to get out.’ The roof collapsed a couple minutes after that.”

The Compass Realty building was demolished on Monday after being ruled structurally unsound by safety inspectors.

Building Inspector Tom Prieato said on Monday that at least a portion of a third building, the former Brown Harris Stevens offices, likely will have to be demolished as well, a decision that will be up to the property owner and the insurance company as the recovery process begins.

The cause of the fire has not been determined, and with the building where it started now demolished, the investigation is left only with the observations of police and fire investigators.

Sag Harbor Village Mayor Sandra Schroeder said on Monday that state arson investigators told village officials that the fire did not appear to have been intentionally set, and that inspectors had not found evidence of an electrical cause. She said that there had apparently been a bucket of cigarette butts on the deck behind one of the apartments, and that investigators seem to be leaning toward that as a likely cause. “There’s only just so many other possibilities,” the mayor said on Monday.

After meeting with engineers, building inspectors and Suffolk County officials on Friday evening, Ms. Schroeder and other Village Board members ordered that the movie theater facade be demolished to prevent injuries should it collapse. After escaping such a nearly catastrophic conflagration without injuries, the mayor said that keeping it that way took priority.

“Nobody has been hurt, everyone is still standing—that’s the most important thing,” Ms. Schroeder said on Friday. “Buildings are just buildings. They can be rebuilt.”