Recovery from the Christmas Fire: More Photos (St. Johnsbury, Vermont)

Fires continue to ravage the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont, to the point where we need our own version of the Three Little Pigs story ... because the buildings have wood frames, even when the outsides are brick or stone, and we continue to be vulnerable. Saturday night a home in Concord, Vermont, was lost; Sunday, oddly, one of the commuter buses burned.

Today Philip C. Marshall (http://www.panoramio.com/photo/18438727?tag=US_VT_St_Johnsbury) generously gave permission for use of his St. Johnsbury photos, and here is one of the 1879 building -- Bruno Ravel's building, where his parents long operated the Landry Drug Store -- before the Christmas 2012 fire struck.

photo by Philip C. Marshall

And here are some pix that the construction crew allowed me to snap last week: reconstructing the brick frame for the shop windows; the room where the drugstore used to be (see the tin ceiling?); and the back exterior.

Progress indeed ...

Readers of COLD MIDNIGHT: Claire and Ben did not climb this structure (although the author has, from the inside); the Saturday night activities on Railroad Street in 1921 made it far too risky. But it will reappear in the 2014 book I'll be writing, The Fire Curse.