Home and barn destroyed in Northeast Kingdom fire

GREENSBORO BEND, Vt. (WCAX) - Investigators are sifting through the rubble at the site of a massive blaze that destroyed a barn and home in Greensboro Bend Tuesday night. The homeowner says not only did she lose her beloved farmhouse, but also decades’ worth of her life’s work.

“It was a wonderful, wonderful house. We were really falling in love with it. We lost everything,” said Priscilla Heine, who along with her husband, has lived in Vermont for more than 40 years.

On Wednesday morning she received the call that her home and barn were a total loss. “By the time the fire department got there, the barn was flat and it was moving to the house very quickly. And we have no idea what happened, absolutely no idea,” Heine said.

The artist is currently in South America preparing for a show. She says she was in the process of renovating the barn and creating an art studio in the barn. She says roughly 30 years’ worth of her work was destroyed. “I may take pieces, images that were very, very dear to me and try to revisit them. They’re all quite different and I may try to do that for myself,” Heine said.

Fire investigators combed through the rubble Wednesday to try and determine a cause. Greensboro Fire Chief David Brochu says fighting the fire was a challenge. “Before I pulled out of my door, I was already calling for help. Just the way the alarm came in as a barn fire, we know right off that barn fires are usually a bad thing. They’re usually large structures, and obviously, this was a very large structure,” he said.

Brochu says a lack of cell service delayed the calls for help and that the home’s metal roof meant crews had to attack the fire from outside. “The fire was so well involved in the house it was unsafe to let people in there. And with the metal roof and stuff, it kept the flames inside,” he said.

Heine says she’s still working to process what’s happened but is confident that she and her husband will be able to start over in the future. “The wonderful things you can hold on to because they’re inside of us, and that’s it. We’re lucky nobody was hurt and we can move on together in a beautiful community, and that makes us still, very lucky people,” she said.

Due to the extensive damage, investigators say the true cause of the fire may never be known.

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