Mark Ward stood in the scorching July sunshine and watched a massive metal claw obliterate more than a century of Baker City history.

And a few years of his own.

Ward attended many classes, as a seventh and eighth grader in the 1970s, in the historic Central Building, which was built in 1916 and served as Baker High School from 1917-52.

On Tuesday, July 9, about six weeks after a human-caused fire gutted the three-story building, a Redmond company started demolishing the structure.

The blaze, which started on the morning of May 22, remains under investigation.

A machine equipped with a claw at the end of an extendable boom gnawed and punched at the northwest corner of the building as Ward, a 1975 Baker High School graduate, stood at the corner of Washington Avenue and Sixth Street.

He watched as the machine, operated by Alpine Abatement of Redmond, obliterated a window on the third floor.

“That was Mr. Ott’s room,” Ward said, referring to Bill Ott, a longtime science teacher.

Ward, whose father, Ralph, attended high school in the Central Building, graduating in 1945, reminisced about his own years in the building faced with locally quarried Pleasant Valley tuffstone.

“The bottom floor was wood shop, and I had band on the second floor,” Mark Ward said.

While Ward was a student, the Central Building, along with the adjacent Helen M. Stack building, comprised Baker Junior High, which housed students from grades 7-9.

He said he was saddened to watch parts of the building, which had endured more than a century of Baker County’s harsh climate, be transformed in a handful of minutes into a pile of crumbled stone, shattered windows and wood scraps jutting out of the debris like half-rotted teeth.

Workers sprayed water from hoses to tamp down dust, potentially containing asbestos from flooring, as the claw smashed down, creating an avalanche of debris with each stroke.

The operator deftly manipulated the machine to knock out sections of the tuffstone outer wall.

The Oregon State Police, the lead agency in the fire investigation, is treating the case as a criminal investigation, said Casey Kump, deputy state fire marshal.

He said investigators have determined the fire started near the southwest corner of the building.

That’s where the fire caused the greatest damage, Kump said. It’s also where eyewitnesses saw smoke first, and where firefighters focused their efforts after the blaze was reported around 6:20 a.m. on May 22.

Kump said investigators “don’t have any reason to think that anyone was inside” the building as it burned.

Kump noted, however, that the building has a “history of people breaking in.”

Baker City Police Chief Ty Duby said on May 22 that police have received reports of people trespassing at the Central Building, which has been closed since 2009.

Ivy Nelson, who has lived next to the historic building for more than 30 years, said in a May 22 interview that she had seen people who appeared to be homeless, though not on that day, enter the small structure attached to the building near the tennis courts, apparently to get out of the weather.

The tennis courts are at the southwest corner of the building, where the fire started, Kump said.

Nelson and her husband, Ernie, also watched on July 9 as the demolition proceeded.

Demolition and asbestos abatement

The school district hired Alpine Abatement of Redmond for the $1.1 million project, which is slated to finish Aug. 16.

Doug Dalton, president of Baker Technical Institute, which owns the building and is part of the school district, said the first priority is to knock down the walls so the safety fence can be moved closer to the building. This will allow them to open streets that have been closed since the fire.

“Our plan is to get those fences back and open access as soon as possible,” he said.

After the walls are down, workers will address the interior, where asbestos is mostly in the floor tiles, Dalton said. A perimeter for the “asbestos regulated work area” will be established close to the building and be accessed only by certified abatement workers.

District officials haven’t determined whether some of the tuffstone can be used for decorative purposes, possibly as part of a memorial.

Tuffstone is also used in many other historic buildings in Baker City, including Baker City Hall, the Baker County Courthouse, and St. Francis de Sales Cathedral.