Fire Damages Historic Si View Park Building

Published 2:20 pm Thursday, October 2, 2008

A fire caused by construction workers did close to $200,000 damage to the old

Si View Park building in North Bend last Thursday. All of the children in the preschool

class were safely evacuated, but two North Bend firefighters suffered minor injuries in

battling the blaze.

The fire was started shortly before 2 p.m. on Oct. 15, presumably by a workman’s

cutting torch. The park complex is being renovated by the King County Parks

Department and that day the Seattle-based

contracting company was using a torch to remove

old foundation bolts.

When the fire was noticed a little later, spreading up the center face of the

building, the North Bend Fire Department was called. The fire trucks arrived less than

five minutes later, and by then a preschool class that was meeting inside the building was

already watching the smoking structure from the ball

field area a few hundred feet away.

The fire took about three hours to put out. Firefighters from the Snoqualmie and Fire

District 10 departments responded to a call for

assistance. About 26 firefighters fought the

blaze, which included cutting into the roof with

axes to attack flames inside the attic. Cleanup

efforts took several more hours.

“It really took off, since the building

(erected in 1939 and now a King County Historic

Landmark) was of a heavy timber construction with

a lot of varnish, and was tinder-dry,” said

North Bend’s deputy chief, Tom Needham.

There was a heavy external attack by all the departments involved, but we really

made progress when we went in through the

roof,” Needham related. “Then it was a very

tedious overhaul and a lot of checking for spot fires.”

The two firefighters who were injured were Ken Mills, who required some sutures in a

finger, and Dave Jones, who had to get a tetanus

shot after stepping on a nail. Both men were in

good condition and out of the hospital the same day.