Investigators with the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives were at the scene of Monday’s tragic fire at the First Christian Church in Washington.

The church on East Second Street caught fire Monday afternoon, but by the time police and fire personnel arrived around 3:15 p.m., the fire was fully involved. It would burn for seven hours, destroying the nearly 100-year-old church and its newly renovated sanctuary. During that time, electricity was shut off to much of downtown, to prevent any electrical contract between firefighting equipment and the electrical lines along the narrow street.

“That fire was burning pretty aggressively by the time we got there and we have heavy fire overhead and very heavy smoke conditions — smoke had already been pushed all the way down to the floor,” Rose said.

The conditions inside the building forced officials to make a quick decision to pull firefighters out of the structure altogether.

“What we were worried about was that the overhead was deteriorating so rapidly that we didn’t want to deal with a roof collapse,” Rose said.

Rose explained that the fire was centralized between the exterior roof and the interior ceiling.

“What we had to do, because fire was not burning through the roof, we had to take out the higher windows. Because we had no access to the fire, we had to create openings along the edge of the roof so we could spray into the building. We basically took the fire out from the exterior of the building,” Rose said, adding that firefighters did enter the building with hoses but stayed at the parameter, spraying into the areas with fire.

It was the metal and massive wood timber construction of the roof that prevented it from collapsing — what was collapsing was the interior part of the structure, he said.

“It has a lot of heavy timber, which is actually what held up the roof and the walls: massive block walls and heavy timber construction. That will withstand a lot of fire. Construction now is lighter. Light construction is a lot earlier,” Rose explained. “That building definitely has a lot of integrity in its construction. But only an engineer can tell you how much can be repaired.”

While Washington Fire Department was on the scene first, Rose said that many other departments pitched in to effort: Bunyan and Chocowinity volunteer fire departments came with trucks and personnel; Williamston and Greenville fire departments brought aerial trucks, able to shoot streams of water at an elevated height; volunteer fire personnel came from Bath. While Greenville’s department was initially covering the Washington Market Street fire station in case of any additional fire calls, Clarks Neck’s volunteer department took over that job as Greenville was called to the scene.

But it wasn’t just firefighters who responded to the blaze, according to Rose. The Salvation Army fed responders; employees with Gregory Poole brought in light towers to illuminate the scene once darkness had fallen; F. Ray Moore Company workers brought in fuel to fill up the fire trucks to keep them running.

“We had a lot of support out there last night,” Rose said. “There were church members and people in the general community bringing water and baskets of fruit-there was a large amount of support for that fire.”

Though investigators with the state and federal agencies were notified of the fire by Washington Police, Rose said the notification is standard procedure: any time there is a fire with a major loss — Rose guessed this one will count in the millions — the SBI is asked by local departments to investigate. As for the ATF investigators, any time a state agency investigates a fire that is specifically at a church, the federal agency is asked to assist in the investigation, Rose said.

“We had no suspicions about that fire at all, from the department’s standpoint,” Rose said.