Another building burns at Letchworth Village

Alex Taylor

lohud.com

HAVERSTRAW — Police are investigating a suspicious fire that tore through an abandoned Letchworth Village building early Sunday — the fourth such fire to hit the former state facility since April.

Firefighters responded after a passer-by noticed smoke near the building off Ridge Road about 12:30 a.m. and called authorities. The two-story stone building was engulfed in flames, officials said.

It took the Thiells, West Haverstraw, Stony Point, Hillcrest and Haverstraw fire departments about a half-hour to control the fire.

No major injures were reported as a result of the fire, but one firefighter was treated at Nyack Hospital for glass shards in his eye after accidentally shattering a window.

Many of the structures on the property are about 100 years old. The Fort Montgomery Fire Department was called in with a tanker because there were no avaliable water sources.

Sunday's blaze was the most recent in a string of suspicious fires on the property, which used to serve as a state facility for people with developmental disorders before it closed in the mid-1990s.

In April, a suspicious fire destroyed a vacant building adjacent to an inactive power plant; fires in July and August also destroyed buildings.

Haverstraw Fire Inspector Frederick Viohl did not connect Sunday's fire with earlier ones but said it was being treated as suspicious and Haverstraw police and the county Bureau of Criminal Investigation are investigating it.

This article was written by Alex Taylor and published by lohud.com on Monday, November 29th 2010 and NOT owned by nor affiliated with opacity.us, but are recorded here solely for educational use.