By Christine McConville
The Boston Herald
BOSTON — Boston fire investigators will today begin an aggressive investigation into what caused the massive Roxbury blaze that tore through a vacant five-building industrial complex late Saturday night.
Officials will ask the first firefighters on scene what they saw — from open windows and doors to discarded cigarette butts, said Steve MacDonald, Boston Fire Department spokesman.
“They will want to know about the condition of the buildings when they arrived,’' MacDonald said.
They will also scour property records and insurance reports to find out who owns the properties and what policies they have on them, he said.
“We’re looking at everything,’' he said.
They will also interview a handful of eyewitnesses and piece together video from neighborhood street cameras along Norfolk Avenue and Howard and Kemble streets.
Boston Fire Chief Erik Pettaway said the fast-moving, nine-alarm fire — fought by 160 firefighters — looked “like a blow torch’’ as it ripped through the buildings, up timber frames and into the arched ceilings.
By midday yesterday, firefighters were still dousing smoldering heaps of rubble.
Pettaway said the blaze caused $750,000 in damage.
Warehouse owner Candeloro Maggio, Jr., of New Hampshire, said the complex where he once ran a frozen food storage business has been completely destroyed.
“It’s gone,” he said of the Norfolk Avenue and Howard Street property he bought in the 1980s.
Three years ago, he shut the operation down, because, he said, chunks of concrete kept falling on his property from a nearby six-story ice tower.
“It destroyed my business,’' Maggio said about the former Boston Ice Company property, which was also destroyed in the blaze.
The city sold the crumbling tower at an auction about a dozen years ago.
Since then, the property has been bought and sold three times. It is currently owned by a subsidiary of the Mayo Group, and is for sale, for $99,000.
The former Boston Ice Company tower had been vacant since a 1963 fire, Pettaway said. Maggio said a for-sale sign went up on the tower about a month ago.
Copyright 2010 Boston Herald Inc.