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Obs Fire
Thu Apr 03, 2003
Listen in RealAudio 
Hi, I'm Bryan Yeaton for The Weather Notebook. On February 9th, 2003, a fire of still
undetermined origin destroyed two generator buildings at the summit of Mount Washington, home
of one of the oldest continuous weather observation records in the United States.
Scot Henley is marketing director for the Observatory.
SH: The fire started in the main building and then spread to the other one. And the fire not
only destroyed those two buildings, but knocked out communications, instrumentation, knocked
out radio stations and all kinds of stuff.
Chris Perruzzi was the shift leader at the summit:
CP: We did what we could. We only had fire extinguishers to help us to try to deal with the
flames and we couldn't fight it from inside because at that point the smoke was too thick in
the generator room. We couldn't even get in to close those, to try and contain the fire at
all. And we're trying to do this with 70 mph winds; temperatures were around zero and we were
in the fog.
This left one of the harshest locations on earth nearly isolated.
CP: We just had to let the building burn. Meanwhile Ken Rancourt and Paul Clark from State
Park were on their way up the mountain just to see what was going on. And then maybe, I don't
know, two minutes later we had lost power, so we had lost all contact with the outside world.
The only thing we had were cell phones.
With the help of New Hampshire State Parks, which owns the summit, as well as the Mount
Washington Auto Road and other local businesses, weather observations are continuing after
only a 23-hour loss.
The Mount Washington Observatory is producer of The Weather Notebook. We are funded by Subaru,
and the National Science Foundation. Read more about the fire at www.mountwashington.org.
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