Office employees take quick action to fight fire on Union Ave

Quick action by local citizens and the Laconia Fire Department prevented a small fire from becoming a big one Thursday morning on Union Avenue. Firefighters responded to 408 Union Ave., the home of Belknap County’s nonprofit New Hampshire Public Defender office, after receiving a call just before 9:30 a.m. on Nov. 20, for a reported fire in the ceiling there. Upon their arrival at work, office employees observed smoke billowing out of the roofline near a window on the south side of the building. When they entered the office, they discovered a fire in a bathroom vent fan and mostly extinguished it using a dry chemical fire extinguisher. “They knocked it down almost completely,” Deputy Chief Louis Loutrel said Thursday at the scene. “They’re lucky they found it when they did.” Firefighters finished the flames with water from their hose lines. The incident was under control at about 9:45 a.m. The fire is not considered suspicious and there were no injuries. While firefighters cleared the scene, employees of the office stood in an adjacent parking lot and police detoured motorists along Butler Street. Typically, fires such as this occur due to an electric fault in the fan, Loutrel said. It’s the third similar fire originating from a bathroom vent fan he could remember over the previous two years or so. Firefighters from Belmont and Gilford also responded to the scene, and others from Franklin and Tilton, and Stewart’s Ambulance Service, covered the Central Station. Firefighters from Meredith covered the Weirs Beach station. 

— Gabriel Perry