LISBON — Firefighters knocked down a small, but difficult-to-reach fire inside a drying machine at Dingley Press on Sunday afternoon.
Deputy Fire Chief Nathan LeClair said it started in a lower drying unit. The call came in at 2:53 p.m.
“One of the byproducts in the drying process collected and caught fire,” he said. “It wasn’t a big fire, it just was a hard one to get into to put out because of the machinery design. We actually had to take things apart. We still couldn’t really reach it — we had to create extensions to our own tools to get in to see where the fire was. Not a lot of fire, not a lot of smoke, it was just time consuming. I would say it was smaller than a typical oven fire.”
Firefighters cleared the scene just after 4:30 p.m. There were no reports of injuries.
The drying unit is out of service, LeClair said, but the rest of the plant was still operational.
With 360 employees, Dingley Press is the largest employer in town and one of only five major catalog printers left in the United States. The plant announced a $17 million expansion last month.
“I’m just thankful that it’s not a machine that’s 100 years old,” LeClair said of Sunday’s fire. “This was thankfully all modern stuff so it stayed contained.”
kskelton@sunjournal.com
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