Fire Destroys Building At Grossman Camp On Dover/Westwood Line

A building was destroyed in a fire earlier this evening at the Jewish Community Centers of Greater Boston Grossman Camp on the Dover/Westwood line.

The Dover, Westwood, and Medfield fire departments all responded to the one-alarm fire before 5 p.m. Wednesday, when they were eventually able to get the fire under control and extinguished.

There were no injuries and the building was unoccupied.

“It caught fire, we don’t know the cause yet. We’re still looking to see,” said Dover Fire Deputy Chief David Tiberi. “I don’t think we’ll ever come up with a cause. I think it will be undetermined. We’re going to pull it apart and see what else we find.”

The Grossman Camp lies on the Dover/Westwood line, and utilizes about 75 acres of land from Hale Reservation; the building that was ignited was used for storage and camp activities, according to fire officials.

“It’s dry, just a little bit of the woods [caught on fire] and the building is totally gone as you can see,” Tiberi said. “It’s a camp building. Part of it was for storage but part of it was all open.”

The call for the fire originally came from a passerby who was touring the grounds of the Grossman Camp on a self-guided tour. 

"It was a pile of leaves on fire," said Melissa, a Dedham resident who asked that her last name not be used. "I tried to put it out myself, and that didn't work. I tried to just stomp it out."

She then called the managers of the camp, and during the call, realized the nearby building had caught aflame. 

"(Officials) were saying that the pile of leaves had a suspicious odor," she added. "It feels suspicious."

“There is something on the roadway. There’s a little pile of leaves burnt in the middle of the road and it has a citronella smell or something like that. It had an odor,” said Tiberi. "There was a lot of debris floating in the air."

Fiona Epstein Vice President of the JCC’s of Greater Boston said, “This is the camp of the JCC’s of Greater Boston and all I’m going to speak about right now is that we’re extremely grateful that no one was hurt. We are very grateful to the fire fighters and we’re confident that we’ll be moving forward."

“We’re dealing with this right now,” she said.

Westwood Deputy Fire Chief Mike Reardon said Westwood responded to the scene after initially attempting to respond to what was believed to be a brush fire. The location of that supposed brush fire, he said, was in fact the scene of the fire at the Grossman Camp. 

"We went out originally for a brush fire out on Dover Road," said Westwood Fire Captain Bill Wood. "Anything up in Grossman Camp, we're an automatic response."