AMHERST — Careless disposal of cigarettes is being blamed for causing a small porch fire at a Main Street home Friday night, as well as a fire that damaged a North Amherst restaurant and market and forced it to close Saturday afternoon, according to the Amherst Fire Department.
The initial fire at 702 Main St., at 10:39 p.m. Friday, started after a lit cigarette was thrown under a porch. Fire Chief Lindsay Stromgren said a resident on the top floor of the residence, which has four apartments, reported smelling smoke and then seeing a small amount of flame coming from the porch.
Police officers who responded to the home found that tenants at three of the apartments were already outside when they got there; others were evacuated while the front porch was still smoking and embers were falling.
Stromgren said firefighters pulled part of the deck off the porch to get at the source of the fire.
Residents were allowed back into the building less than an hour later.
The second fire, at just before 1 p.m. Saturday, occurred at Cushman Market and Cafe, 491 Main St., where a cigarette was tossed below a staircase at the back of the building, starting a small fire that got into an exterior wall.
Firefighters had to pull off wallboards to get at the fire from the exterior, and also moved a toilet from a bathroom on the inside to access the fire.
The damage was minor, but the business closed for the remainder of Saturday, Stromgren said.
While the department on social media praised “observant bystanders” for reporting both fires so they could be quickly extinguished, Stromgren said not properly disposing of cigarettes continues to be a problem.
Last April, a downtown apartment building was damaged and remained uninhabitable through the summer after smoking materials caused a wooden porch to catch on fire, and a home in Leverett was destroyed in March when smoking materials were discarded outside.
