Pain d'Auvingnon Burns to ground!

[Timh]

Pain d'Auvignon, the amazing bread bakery located in Hyannis, Cape Cod, was gutted by a fire. From capecodonline.com:

Firefighters discovered flames in the ceiling when they got to a burning oven and dislodged some of the acoustical tiles above the oven as they were putting out that fire, Hubler said.

The bakery is usually a 24-hour operation, grossing $5 million a year, baking bread for 300 accounts from the casinos in Connecticut to outlets in Boston.

"It is a Cape Cod institution," owner Toma Stamenkovic said, while watching workers clean up yesterday afternoon.

The bakery provides breads and more for restaurants, Boston hotels and even Whole Foods. A second bakery under the same ownership is located on Long Island, but Stamenkovic could not say yesterday whether he would be able to count on distributing bread from that site.

According to Hubler and Deputy Fire Chief Dean Melanson, yesterday morning's blaze was the final act in a chain of fires at the bakery that started just before midnight when flour and other baking products, congealed in an oven's exhaust pipe, caused baking loaves of bread to catch fire. A baker put those loaves into an outside Dumpster and put out the fire with a hose.

But when the last baker left at around 3:45 a.m., the flour and baking products in the exhaust pipe had already ignited a chimney fire that spread to the ceiling.

[iriee]

sad