There were precious minutes of indecision, which wasted critical time in finding and turning on the water spigot for the hose. About fifty hands on duty at the plant rushed to refinery, grabbing hoses and attempting to put out the blaze. The watchman pulled an alarm, alerting the plantвЂ™s workers and sending a signal to the fire department. Dense smoke quickly filled the room and flames soon leapt from storeroom. The night shift was just appearing at 4pm when watchman Edward Haman began to smell smoke and found the flames in a storeroom on the refineryвЂ™s first floor. Three watchmen, two superintendents and two assistants remained in the refinery. For a quarter century they had refined huge amounts of sugar without incident, but their luck would run out that January day.ДЄt about three oвЂ™ clock in the afternoon, Theodore Havemeyer made his customary inspection of the plant and noticed nothing suspicious. The presence of steam, thousands of moving parts that could cause sparks in the refinery and the highly flammable sugar all made fire a grave risk.

Having been in the sugar business for more than eighty years, the Havemeyer family knew the danger that fires often broke out in sugar refineries. The refinery, the largest building in Williamsburg at the time, was nine stories high, covering an entire block on Wythe Avenue between South Third and South Fourth streets and stretching some two hundred feet in from the street to the East river shore. On a frigid January night, the Havemeyer and Elder Refinery, which would forty years later be renamed as Domino, went up in one of the most spectacular fires the area had ever witnessed. January 9th marks the one hundred thirty-sixth anniversary of one of the most destructive fires in North Brooklyn.

Domino sugar fire