East Hampton Village Hall Open on Monday After Fire, Smoke

opened for business on Monday, less than 10 hours after .

"Fortunately it wasn't too bad, certainly not bad enough to keep workers away this morning," said Village Administrator Larry Cantwell, who rushed to the historic village hall building on Sunday night after getting a frantic phone call from Village Board Member Barbara Borsack at about 9:30 p.m.

The Chief Ray Harden said Kenny Cullum, a volunteer firefighter who also happens to be the village fire marshal, extinguished a basement fire that started when an electrical cord for Christmas lights shorted out.

"We were lucky. Thank God for alarm systems that work and the firemen, and Kenny, who got here so quickly," Cantwell said from his office on Monday morning.

The building was full of smoke in the aftermath. "All that stuff gets into the ventilation system . . . that's where you get that repeated, long-term odor from," Cantwell said. Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning technicians were already working on cleaning out the ducts on Monday, he said.

Cantwell added that the village is getting estimates on the dust removal from the rest of the building, and that insurance adjusters had been called to assess the damage. 

East Hampton Village Hall occupies a building that predates the American Revolution. "This building was built in the early 1700s, it's all wood. It wouldn't take long to destroy this building," Cantwell said.

"When something like this happens you realize how fortunate you are to escape disaster," he added.

However, he said, important village records are kept safe in a fire-retardant record storage room that was added when the village bought the building. "All of the critical records of the village, the main frame computer -- this building could literally burn down and everything in that record storage room would be secure. It's really like a safe."

Computer systems are also backed-up off-site daily. In the past two years, the village had undertaken a project to digitize all of the building permit records. In fact, the 125 boxes full of paper records has since been disposed of.

"It would have been a catastrophe," he said, "But the core of the records of the village would be preserved."

In 2011, Cantwell said the village will continue with the next phase of the project, using a $40,000 grant from the state, to scan all of the advisory board records into the same system that manages the building permit records.