Firefighters from Pawtucket, Central Falls and Providence fight a blaze yesterday at a vacant mill building in Pawtucket.

The Providence Journal / Mary Murphy

PAWTUCKET — An early morning fire gutted a vacant two-story brick mill near the Central Falls line yesterday morning.

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The column of smoke from the fire at the old Standard Uniform mill at the corner of Conant and Pine streets was visible for miles during yesterday morning’s commute. The building was unoccupied and virtually empty, Fire Chief Timothy P. McLaughlin said, making firefighters’ biggest concern keeping the fire from spreading to nearby buildings.

McLaughlin and other city officials declined to guess yesterday about what caused the blaze, saying investigators probably wouldn’t be able to go inside until this morning. He said he expected the 94-year-old building would be a total loss.

When they arrived at about 8:30 a.m., McLaughlin said at first firefighters went in to try to put the fire out, but realized the building was so engulfed it was too dangerous to be inside. He said they switched to a “100-percent outside attack.”

“We saw it from headquarters, heavy, black smoke,” McLaughlin said. “When we arrived, there was fire coming out of every window on the second floor.”

McLaughlin said the fire was brought more or less under control in about an hour and a half, though there was still a section in the middle of the roof that was burning into the afternoon. Officials said no one was seriously hurt fighting the blaze.

Harvey E. Goulet Jr., director of administration for Mayor James E. Doyle, said he was driving to work and followed the smoke, arriving at the scene at around the same time fire crews did. He said he saw flames coming out of every window on the building’s second floor.

“It was shaking,” he said.

McLaughlin said Pawtucket and Central Falls sent every piece of fire apparatus they had to the fire. Goulet said some people who saw the smoke assumed it was in Central Falls, and called that city’s Fire Department, so its engines arrived along with Pawtucket’s. Goulet credited the timely arrival of the Central Falls firefighters with making it easier to set up the initial cordon that kept the fire from spreading.

The fire trucks from Pawtucket and Central Falls were soon joined by firefighters from Valley Falls, Providence, North Providence, Johnston, Attleboro and East Providence as the morning went on. Pumpers and ladder trucks were arrayed around the two-block building, with firefighters stationed at intervals along the side streets, aiming their hoses at the open windows on the fiery second floor, pushing the flames back inside.

The mill is in an industrial area full of 1800s and early 1900s mills. It was down the street from the Paramount Cards building and not far from the Pawtucket School Department’s school bus parking lot. Unlike the November 2003 Greenhalgh Mill fire, where embers drifted into a residential neighborhood and set off other fires that destroyed more than a dozen houses, McLaughlin said yesterday’s fire was in a much smaller building that was not near any residential areas.

“This was nothing like that,” he said.

Firefighters concentrated on protecting surrounding buildings, especially one that houses the Furniture Warehouse on Barton Street, because its back was across a side street from the fire, and a next-door Conant Street mill that housed the Yarn Outlet. Neither suffered serious damage, McLaughlin said

City Building Official John Hanley said a contractor had been hired to clean up contaminated soil at the site, but he said he didn’t know if that had anything to do with the fire. Several barrels of chemicals were in the building at the time of the fire, but McLaughlin said they didn’t pose a safety hazard to firefighters.

“It’s just an old mill,” McLaughlin said. “That’s the way it’s built, the way it’s structured. They go up fast.”

jhill@projo.com