Forest industry watchers were surprised on Friday as news unfolded of a fire inside a Robbins Lumber facility in Searsmont.

Still owned by the same family that founded it on the St. George River in 1881, Robbins Lumber is well respected and well known across the forest industry, said Eric Kingsley, an industry analyst at Innovative Natural Resource Solutions in Portland.

“They’re a really well-run company,” he said. “They’ve been a part of Midcoast Maine’s forest industry since forever.”

Authorities said the explosion and fire, which killed one firefighter and injured at least 10 other people, drew a large emergency response. Catherine Robbins-Halsted, one of the owners of Robbins Lumber, said Friday that all employees were accounted for.

As she watched first responders battle to put the fire out on Friday, Searsmont resident Lori Ward said schoolchildren from the area often take field trips and tours of the lumberyard.

“It’s a big part of this community,” she said. “We saw all the smoke and immediately knew this was bad.” 

Robbins Lumber employs more than 200 people, according to testimony that Robbins-Halsted, its vice president of administration, shared with lawmakers earlier this year.

The family-run company has also been involved in advocating for the industry. Former president Jim L. Robbins, whose grandchildren help run the company today, had at one point presided over the Maine Forest Products Council, the New England Lumberman’s Association and the Northeastern Loggers’ Association, according to his obituary in 1997.

Dana Doran, director of Professional Logging Contractors of the Northeast, said on Friday that Robbins Lumber buys its wood from close to a hundred logging contractors in the region, and it gets wood chips from a few dozen companies within a 60-mile radius of Searsmont.

“The health of our forests, the local economy, the jobs that are produced — the financial impact is significant,” Doran said. “They’re an important player and have been for generations.”

Christian Halsted, part of the Robbins family, said during a news conference Friday afternoon that Robbins Lumber will be closed for the rest of the week while the fire is investigated.

“This is obviously a hugely devastating day for the family,” Halsted said. “We feel for the first responders, family, the employees.”

Messages to the company seeking comment were not returned on Friday.

Jeff Easterling, president of the Northeastern Lumbers Manufacturing Association, said any long-term closures would have a “severe impact” on the community members working for the mill.

“Most of their employees probably came within a town or two around the mill,” Easterling said. “Any kind of disruption certainly will impact that town, without question.”

In 2011, the governor’s office heralded the Robbins family for their forest stewardship. It awarded them a Maine Department of Conservation award, and the department’s commissioner called them “an iconic Maine family.”

Robbins Lumber is one of the biggest white pine mills in the country. White pine is used for decorative applications like paneling and furniture, not to hold up the structure of a house, said Kingsley, the industry analyst.

The campus in Searsmont includes two primary mills — a sawmill and a planing mill, where the wood gets finished. It also includes kilns to extract moisture from the wood; warehouses to store the wood before it’s shipped; and a biomass power plant. Robbins Lumber opened the power plant in 2018 under the name Georges River Energy. It allows them to sell energy to the New England power grid, said Kingsley, and it gives the lumber company a guaranteed, secure market for its leftover wood.

Just before it opened, it attracted the attention of U.S. Sen. Angus King, who held a Senate committee field hearing at the company in 2017 and talked about its efforts to preserve rural jobs.

Shane O’Neill, forest industry business development manager at the University of Maine, said the Robbins family has been active in helping the state’s forestry industry in recent years. They’ve seen the paper industry in decline and have donated time and effort to help. He sees the biomass plant as part of that effort, since it helps make tree harvesting more profitable by creating a market for parts of the trees that can’t be made into boards.

Several generations of Robbins have graduated from UMaine, and the family has supported endowments to help students get into the forest sector, O’Neill said.

O’Neill said that the Searsmont volunteer firefighters are part of the community alongside the Robbins’ employees.

“Searsmont’s not a very big town, so everybody kind of knows each other, and when your family’s hurting, everybody hurts,” he said.

In 2024, another fire on campus took place in a control room for the kilns, according to multiple news reports. It was contained and didn’t result in any injuries. The PenBay Pilot reported that the Searsmont Fire Department had a roster of 14 volunteers, many of whom were out in the woods hunting when the call came in and returned to Robbins Lumber to respond.

“Every sawmill and pellet mill at some point has fires,” Kingsley said. “You have a lot of wood and a lot of machines. The industry spends a lot of time making sure that these fires are prevented, and the equipment’s installed to mitigate any fires.”

Robbins Lumber has had one workplace safety incident investigated by the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration in the past decade. It happened in 2025, and the company was fined $5,427. The details of the incident are not immediately clear, but according to OSHA records it appeared to involve a lack of regular inspections of procedures in the planer facility.

Staff Writers Drew Johnson, Morgan Womack and Dylan Tusinski contributed to this story.