Today, I went down to the waterfront to check on the damage caused by last night’s fire. The building looks like it has been pretty much gutted by the blaze and it mostly likely will have to be demolished, which will change the look of the Lunenburg waterfront drastically. This building was on pretty much every postcard of Lunenburg.
If the building actually is salvageable, I wonder if it would actually be wise to fix it. I think that it would be better to build a new building with the same dimensions of the old one, but to today’s building standards which are much safer. Frankly, it’s not as though the building was some sort of triumph of architecture. It was basically a giant red rectangle with a peaked roof.
The fire marshal says the fire was most likely electrical in nature, which ties into my theory that for a lot of the buildings around here, the upkeep isn’t that good. I wonder how many decades it’s been since many of these places have been inspected and what kind of building code violations they’d let slide for a building that was built before the codes existed.
Looking at this, they were very lucky that those two gas tanks on the left didn’t explode.