Bangor Daily News
BANGOR, Maine — The owners of a Bass Harbor restaurant and attached home that was destroyed in a fire 14 months ago have sued in U.S. District Court members of the Trenton and Southwest Harbor fire departments alleging firefighters were negligent in fighting the blaze.
Robert L. and Judy A. Cousins, owners of Cap’n Nemos, also sued a reporter, editor and publisher of a Mount Desert Island weekly newspaper alleging the paper libeled them in an article that incorrectly said the Cousinses had pumped their sewage holding tanks into the road. The complaint did not say when the article was published.
The restaurant, which looked like a lighthouse and served burgers and seafood, burned to the ground the night of Dec. 3, 2013, according to a previously published report.
The Cousins have demanded a jury trial.
Answers to the complaint have not yet been filed but the Portland attorney representing the Tremont firefighters said Thursday that he has received it.
“The evidence will show that the town and the fire department handle the fire appropriately,” Robert W. Bower Jr. said. “It was a tragic fire. The firefighters did their best, but Cap’n Nemos couldn’t be saved.”
Efforts to reach Earl Brechlin, editor of the MDI Islander, owned by the Ellsworth American, were unsuccessful Thursday morning.
The couple, who filed the lawsuit in December on their own behalf without an attorney, are seeking, among other things, $1.86 million in compensatory damages and the replacement of the firefighters who allegedly did not do all they could to put out the blaze.
Robert L. Cousins claimed that firefighters discriminated against him because he is “a 100 [percent] disabled Vietnam veteran purposefully made homeless, jobless by the willful and wanton destruction” of his business and home.
The fire in the Tremont village of Bass Harbor on Mount Desert Island was reported just before 8 p.m, Tremont Fire Chief Keith Higgins, who was named in the lawsuit, told the Bangor Daily News two days after the fire. All the fire departments on Mount Desert Island and the fire departments from Trenton, Hancock and Lamoine responded to the call.
The building collapsed in on itself a couple hours after the call came in, but Higgins and his crew remained on the scene until 7 a.m. Dec. 4, 2013, to make sure all the structures in the area were safe, according to the article published by the BDN on Dec. 5, 2013. Besides the restaurant, an old wooden lobster boat, which was near the building that burned down, was the only other structure that was badly damaged, Higgins said.
The fire chief said 14 months ago that the cause of the blaze was accidental.
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