by Troy Kehoe (tkehoe@wsbt.com)
(WSBT) A local furniture making company went up in smoke on Tuesday. Miller Custom Hardwoods is located on State Road 19 in Wakarusa. It shut down traffic for about two and a half hours.

All that remains of the factory is 10,000 square feet of charred tables, chairs, roof support beams reduced to a pile of rubble — 20 years of hard work and memories destroyed in just a few hours.


Shirley Null thought it would be a relaxing lunch break. Turns out, she thought wrong.

“I saw flames coming out of the spray room and I was out. Everybody got out,” Null said.

Then firefighters were in — but not completely.

“We weren’t going to go inside because it was fully engulfed and the building was a bad roof design for anybody to go in with that kind of heat on the inside,” Wakarusa Fire Chief Brian Mauer said.

So, crews struggled to maintain their hold on the flames from the outside as Null and her coworkers stood in disbelief.

“It’s terrible, it’s horrific,” Null said. “I don’t know what to think.”

Meanwhile, the building’s owner stood motionless as he stared at dozens of hoses leading to a wall of flames and smoke, but all he could think of was paperwork.

“Well, there’s some insurance. I don’t know if it’s enough, but there’s some,” building owner Gordon Clark said.

A nearby tenant’s thoughts were of wind.

“The wind was coming out of the east and it keeping the fire and the flame and the smoke away from our building, which is only about 50 feet away,” Tim Reece said.

That brought some comfort to Null, but those images refused to go away. Tables and chairs now charred, water logged trailers destroyed, but above all, thoughts of what the future might now hold.

“We’re just going to have to wait and look and see what comes,” Null said.

Fire investigators are still on the scene looking as well as trying to find out what caused this massive blaze. So far, they don’t have much to go on but say there’s nothing that leads them to believe it’s suspicious.

Even those investigators have had to take it easy at the scene just like fire crews did this afternoon as they battled temperatures approaching the 90s.