House fire on the mountain

FALLS VILLAGE — It would have seemed that if any house was ever safe from burning down to the ground, it would have been Robert Klimczak’s at 163 Music Mountain Road. Just behind Klimczak’s house is the home of Falls Village Volunteer Fire Department Chief Dave Seney. Across the street is the home of state Fire Marshall Ralph Miller. Next door to Klimczak is the home of Al Jacquemin, who has a young German shorthaired pointer with especially acute hearing.

And in fact it was Jacquemin’s dog, Gunner, who alerted his owner that something was amiss early Sunday morning, April 5.

“It was about a quarter to four,� Jacquemin recalled. “Gunner was sleeping downstairs, and he always barks when there’s something outside. I usually just holler down and tell him to keep quiet, and then he stops. But this time he kept barking. So I got up and saw that there was a fire outside, and I called 911.�

Fire volunteers were there within minutes, but the house had already burned to basically nothing by the time they arrived. Seney said that when he heard the alarm, he looked out his bedroom window “and it was completely orange outside.�

Falls Village Fire Marshall Stan Macmillan said the cause of the fire is undetermined.

“It’s still under investigation,� he said. As for the speed with which the house burned down, he said, “My assumption would be that the fire had been going for a long time before it was noticed.�

Klimczak purchased the property (which is near the stone barn on Music Mountain Road) in October 2001 for $63,000, according to Vision Appraisals, which does property valuations for the town. He was in the process of building a house from the frame of a former chapel that he had purchased and had shipped down from Nova Scotia.

He had been coming up to Falls Village and working on the house on a part-time basis (he had been there on Saturday but was not in the house at the time of the fire).

“It was a post-and-beam style house, two stories, 2,000 square feet,� Macmillan said. “It was the kind of house that the settlers might have built, with large 8-by-8 beams, all notched.�

Klimczak had completed the building’s foundation and had built some additional framework.

“It had a roof system on it that was shingled and he had plywood on the exterior walls, so it was totally enclosed except for a couple gable ends,� Macmillan said. “They’ve been working on this for three or four years.�

Some of the beams survived the blaze, and the foundation remains. Everything else was destroyed.

Several neighbors said they heard a loud popping noise, or a small explosion from the property. Macmillan said it was probably the sound of the water heater exploding in the basement.  

“That was not the cause of the fire,� he said. “It probably blew up because of the heat.�

Volunteers from Falls Village, North Canaan, Cornwall and Lakeville worked together to get the fire under control. They began to arrive at 3:54 a.m. and had it under control by around 5:30 a.m., Macmillan said.Firefighters remained at the scene until about 11 a.m.

It was quite windy at the time of the fire, and Jacquemin said he was worried that the fire would spread to his own property.

“It was coming toward my house,� he said, “and I have horses. I didn’t want the hay to catch fire.�

“Fortunately, it had rained during the night,� Macmillan said. “There was a brush fire that started, and it burned all the way around the house. But once it got away from the heat of the house, it basically extinguished itself. That’s a very wooded area and it could have been extremely dangerous. They would have had to fight a house fire at the same time that they were fighting a brush fire that was pushing up the mountain.�

Although he did not have statistics available, Macmillan said this was the first structure fire in Falls Village in quite some time.