“We Did The Best We Could”

Two weeks after Delaney’s Restaurant and Tap Room burned to the ground in the heart of Westville Village, Fire Chief Allyn Wright returned to tell neighbors that his crews did all they could in the face of an all-night electrical fire they had no chance of stopping.

In fact, Wright (at far left in photo) told them, if they had tried to fully extinguish the fire once it was raging, a more devastating explosion could have occurred.

Wright joined more than a dozen other city and civic officials at a fire post-mortem that took place Wednesday night in the gym at Mauro-Sheridan Science, Technology and Communications School on Fountain Street. Some 70 neighbors showed up for the discussion, which took place at a meeting of the Westville/West Hills Community Management Team.

“I want to apologize to each and every one of you. That’s part of your community that’s” gone, Wright told the crowd.“We did the best we could under the circumstances. We also learned from this.”

Wright said that right after the fire started on the evening of Aug. 25 at the historic Delaney’s building at the corner of Whalley and Central avenues, a live power line snapped right outside the building. That meant it was too dangerous for firefighters to go inside. It took United Illuminating a half-hour to arrive on the scene to shut off the power.

The firefighters up the street at the Westville station also didn’t arrive right away at the scene, because they were handling another fire taking place on Marvel Road.

The 100-plus-year-old building had lots of ​“Class A combustibles” like kerosene in the wood, asbestos, and cases of alcohol in the basement, Wright said. He said the restaurant used gas for cooking; that meant that fully smothering the fire could have created ​“a serious gas leak,” which could have then caused an explosion.

Pretty early on the firefighters knew the building was a lost cause, he said. With the help of fellow firefighters from East Haven, Hamden, and West Haven, they spent the night and through the next morning focusing on keeping the fire from spreading to other buildings. They used more than 3 million gallons of water in the process.

Wright acknowledged that what people heard in the press (i.e. this story) was true about some ​“internal problems” at the scene with the department, but he said that didn’t affect the department’s ability to handle the fire.

Other officials at the meeting discussed efforts to help the tenants displaced by the fire (click here for a story about the last displaced tenants to remain homeless) as well as to begin thinking about what should rise in Delaney’s wake. No decisions have been made yet about what to build there.

State Rep. Pat Dillon spoke of how for centuries that location has served as a watering hole and central meeting spot for the neighborhood.

Mayor Toni Harp (pictured) called the three-alarm blaze ​“perhaps the worst fire we have had in the past decade in New Haven.”

“All of us recognize how important Delaney’s is to the way we see Westville,” she said. ​“in many respects we’re all mourning. We’re going to work very hard to make something happen there. But nothing will ever replace Delaney’s in our hearts.”