Originally Posted by
Newsday.com
A large abandoned building across the street from Republic Airport in East Farmingdale went up in flames before dawn this morning, closing down Conklin Street for more than one hour and taking about 100 firefighters from five local departments almost three hours to extinguish.
No one was injured in the blaze, East Farmingdale Fire Chief Anthony Nicholes said. The origin of the fire, considered suspicious according to fire officials, is being investigated by the Suffolk Arson Squad as well as the Town of Babylon Fire Marshals Office. The building, abandoned for about 20 years, is owned by the New York State Department of Transportation, officials said. Previously, it was part of the Republic Aviation Corporation manufacturing complex, later Fairchild-Republic, and then for about 10 years was the site of a flea market.
"It has been abandoned for at least 20 years," Town of Babylon Chief Fire Marshal Gilbert W. Hanse said this morning. "It has no utilities. In the last seven or eight years, the roof collapsed. It is a very dangerous building . . . Basically, it's a shell."
The fire did not interfere with LIRR operations, but was a concern to flight operations at Republic Airport, Nicholes said. Though not directly in the flight paths of Republic runways, the effort was a so-called "tower-ladder operation" -- meaning firefighters needed huge ladders to spray water onto the fire. The height of those ladders could have interfered with arriving and departing flights at Republic, which has many small aircraft operating from the field -- a lot of them under visual flight rules. But airport officials said the fire did not affect any airport operations. "Airport officials were aware of the fire," Republic spokesman Gary Lewi said, adding that airport officials were kept apprised of the situation as part of standard operating procedures. But, Lewi said: "There was no impact on flight ops ."
For more than four decades the site was home to the Republican Aviation Corp., which was founded in 1939 and built a number of notable military aircraft that served the U.S. in World War II, Korea, Vietnam and the Middle East. Those aircraft included the P-47 Thunderbolt, the F-84 Thunderjet and Thunderstreak, the F-105 Thunderchief and, after the company was bought out by Fairchild in 1965 becoming Fairchild-Republic, the A-10 Thunderbolt II -- a jet ground-attack fighter better known as "The Warthog."
Reply With Quote
Bookmarks