Toms River-- Detours up hours after The fire at 236 Hooper Avenue are a grim reminder of the loss of a historic home.

Investigators search for the source and origin of the blaze at the historic home formerly owned by Captain Amos Birdsall in the late 1800's.

Fire at 224 Washington Street, downtown Toms River
Fire at 236 Washington Street in downtown Toms River, Photo by Vin Ebenau, TSM News
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One bystander's initial reaction to the fire was it would spread into the nearby Ocean County Historical Society building.

"All I could think of was, 'Oh my gosh' if this building goes," said the bystander. "We have so many historical records since the beginning of the county."

 

The building housed Childers/Sotheby's International Realty, Oliver & Co, and Hometown Heroes, the non-profit that for the second time since 2014 will be forced to find a new home.

Hometown Heroes Director Michael Schwartz is in complete disbelief.

"We had a fire, as you know, two years ago the same month," said Schwartz. "So it's a little surreal to find out that your office is burned down again."

He adds they haven't yet recovered from the first fire which came two years after Superstorm Sandy, further adding to the shock value for the organization.

Even though this fire occurs nearly two years to the month at their old location, Schwartz says he isn't suspicious of any malicious intent.

"I don't want to jump to any conclusions at the moment, the building is over 100 years old," said Schwartz. "In talking to the investigators downtown today, and the landlord, they assume it's electrical but we're going to let them do their due diligence and see where it leads them."

The fire engulfed the home in the early hours of the morning and as firefighters continued putting out the blaze the numbness of everyone who work inside the home felt will now affect all of the people who have come in for their business.

"The landlord made her due diligence and she was calling everyone about seven o clock in the morning," said Schwartz. "From my understanding they were out there about four in the morning and they waited until a reasonable hour to start calling everybody."

As for what Hometown Heroes will do next on both where they will go and how they will recover from the fire, Schwartz has no words.

"Right now I'm speechless, the first couple hours (post fire) we really don't know what we're going to do," said Schwartz. "That's probably the furthest thought from our mind right now."

The day to day activities of working with people may be a challenge at least temporarily, until they do find a new residence to set up shop.

"There's quite a few people out there who call our offices on a daily basis that we'll at least have to let know we're having a disruption in service at this time," said Schwartz.

Schwartz says they have back ups of all their information, but adds the struggle to pick everything up again will be a challenge because he doesn't believe anything can be saved from the building.

"We still haven't recovered from the last fire and there's a lot of things we back up on the cloud, and services like that," said Schwartz. "But there's a lot of paper files that we have and we weren't able to recover most of them from the last fire. We rebuilt a lot of those when we moved into the new office."

This is a developing story, Check back here for more details.

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