Fire destroys former library building
Thirty-five firefighters, and seven appliances and tankers from Upper Takaka, Collingwood, DOC, Takaka and Fonterra attended the fire. Photos: Kindly supplied by Rob Dawson.
Takaka’s former war memorial library building burned down in the early hours of Saturday 2 October and Police are treating the fire as suspicious.
People staying in the upstairs accommodation of the neighbouring BNZ building were woken early on Saturday by the sound of hissing LPG cylinders and quickly raised the alarm.
The council-owned building has lately been the premises of Maurice Massey’s business Timeless Creations, but was condemned as structurally unsound and therefore hazardous after inspection by fire investigators, building inspectors and insurance assessors, and was destined for swift demolition. The brass commemorative plaques from the entranceway will be preserved.
The building itself is no longer a war memorial because that status was transferred to the new library building on its completion.
The building had neither heat-sensitive alarms nor a sprinkler system. Ironically, the council is within days of letting the tender for the reticulated fire-fighting water scheme for the Takaka township.
“To have sprinklers you’ve got to have reticulated water,” explained Takaka fire chief Philip Woolf. “And we’ve been asking for that for three years now. This is the classic wake-up call. We arrived at the fire with 11,000 litres of water in our tanker and we called in the Upper Takaka and Collingwood brigades as well as tankers from Fonterra. There was a brief period between the time we emptied our tanker and the time the next one could get here. We had to stand and watch the fire burn for that time. If it had been in the Wholemeal building we’d have lost a fair bit of the CBD, I’d say.”
Many have commended the fire-fighters for containing the fire in the old library building. Just how close it got the wooden Harcourts building next door could be seen by the scorched paint on the back of an adjacent soft-drink vending machine.
“If the fire had jumped into those buildings it could have been very serious,” said Mr Woolf. “You wouldn’t even want to think about the loss of the museum, for example.”
Council property manager Jim Frater said that council would be “starting to think about what should happen to the site” and that there would be “a degree of community engagement in that process.”
“The building was fully insured and had a value of about $360,000. The money we received from the lease was committed to the loan on the new library,” said Mr Frater. “If something is built on the site, it might have to assume that role. If we decide not to rebuild, the insurance payout could be used as a lump-sum reduction of the new library loan, or the repayments might have to come from somewhere else. All these options need to be considered.”
Mr Frater said that the building did not have monitored alarms because “the tenant wouldn’t have wanted the ongoing cost.”
“We have written to Maurice and terminated the lease. I feel very sorry for him and I hope he has the insurance and the will to get himself up and going again.”
Mr Frater was raised in East Takaka in the late 1950s and he says he has fond memories of being taken into the library every Friday.
“Dad used to take five of us in and I think we were allowed five books each for the week. The Fraters used to leave with a lot of books.”
Sgt Arthur Clarence says that the Police want to hear from anyone who can assist with infromation about the fire. Fire chief Philip Woolf is asking for anyone with a photo of the fire actually burning to send him a copy.
Neil Wilson
