Tina Alvey
Officials in Hinton have asked for the state Fire Marshal’s assistance in investigating three suspicious fires over a six-block radius in town on Thursday night and early Friday morning.
“The first call came at 8:45 last night,” Fire Chief Ray Pivont said Friday morning. “It was an abandoned structure. The second one was called in at 12:40 (a.m. Friday), also a vacant building. The third call came in at around 3:45 this morning; that was an occupied building on 6th Avenue.”
Pivont said there were no injuries, adding he did not yet have any names of residents of the last structure or of owners of any of the buildings.
“It was very suspicious,” Pivont said of the trio of fires, especially as two were in empty buildings.
“No heat, no electricity. It really points to someone setting them deliberately,” he said.
According to a Hinton VFD spokesman, one of the empty structures had burned previously and was already declared a total loss, while the other vacant building was only partially destroyed by this week’s blaze. The occupied home is a total loss as well, the spokesman said.
— E-mail: talvey@register-herald.com
