‘HOW COULD SOMEONE DO THIS?’
BLAZES GUT HEART OF TOWN, BUT NOT NEWFOUNDLANDERS’ PRIDE
Hilda Kelly’s first thought, upon seeing a swarm of cars and trucks and flashing lights outside Greenwood Manor at 5 a. m. Tuesday, was that someone in her senior’s residence was gravely ill. So the 86- year- old went to investigate. It was still dark, but what Kelly saw, peering through her window, was unmistakable: thick smoke and flames, illuminating the pre-dawn sky.
Kelly knew instantly that the school her son, Clarence, attended as a child must be burning, as was the town hall across the street where Clarence, now the deputy mayor of Milltown- Bay d’Espoir, a tight- knit Newfoundland community of about 800 people, regularly met with his colleagues to discuss local issues.
What Hilda didn’t know was that the local RCMP detachment was also ablaze, and that the three fires were deliberately set, gutting the heart of a small town with a big sense of pride and a long history of purpose.
“That’s the hardest part, knowing that someone may have done this on purpose,” says Clarence Kelly. “If it had started because of faulty electrical wiring, or something like that, you could almost think — ‘Oh well,’ — and get on with it.
“But this? How could someone do this?”
Hilda Kelly phoned her son after she peered through her window. The deputy mayor lives with his wife, Colleen, about a kilometre up the road. He stepped outside. The air smelled like smoke.
By 8 a. m., volunteer firefighters from five different towns had descended on tiny Milltown. The three fires had been set in sequence, complicating the fight for the first crews on hand.
They couldn’t be everywhere.
“The elementary school was just levelled, burned right down to the foundation,” Clarence Kelly says. “Several generations from around here have been through that school. The biggest priority now is finding a place for these kids to go to school, it is really the only schooling in the area.”
Milltown was historically a community of shipbuilders. Timber from the surrounding forests became masts for fishing schooners. Fortunes were built in the late nineteenth and twentieth century, and then fortunes faded away. Aquaculture and hydro work are the two main employers today.
But t he stories of t he past remain. The town hall housed a popular museum. While firefighters were able to save several computers and town- related business folders from the building, the museum, chock- a- block with heirlooms, antiques, old molasses barrels and shipbuilding tools related to Milltown’s past, burned.
“What was lost are things that you can’t put a value on, because they are things t hat you can’ t r eplace,” says Colleen Kelly, Clarence’s wife and a museum volunteer. “There was a huge photograph collection dating back to the 1800s. People here were really fond of it.”
And that is what Milltown is all about, says the deputy mayor: the people. By mid- morning Tuesday, the local Lion’s Club had become a gathering place. No one wanted to believe what was happening. Everybody wanted to help. Firefighters who had been on their feet since 5 a.m. rotated through the community centre, filling up on soup, sandwiches, home- baked muffins and coffee.
Clarence Kelly isn’t a coffee drinker. By 2: 30 p. m. local time, he had finished a third cup. The deputy mayor wasn’t asking f or sympathy for his town, he said, but he thought people should know a few facts. Kelly knows everybody in Milltown by their first name because he is related to almost all of them, somehow, he says, laughing. And this place — his home — was pounded by Hurricane Mat- t hew in October. Roads and water mains and sewer lines were damaged. It wasn’t easy dealing with the mess, but the people pulled together, because that is what they do.
“Now we are facing this,” Kelly says. “Today we are in shock, but tomorrow we’ ll get down to business.
“We’r e going to get through it.”
Donald MacHaight, a 48- year- old with a shaved head and a goatee, entered the Grand Falls- Windsor provincial courthouse in handcuffs Tuesday afternoon.
He was wearing blue jeans and a blue sweater. He is charged with three counts of arson in connection with the Milltown fires.