{"id":25857,"date":"2025-11-05T19:12:10","date_gmt":"2025-11-05T19:12:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/25857\/"},"modified":"2025-11-05T19:12:10","modified_gmt":"2025-11-05T19:12:10","slug":"fire-destroys-sawmill-building-in-northwestern-berks-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/25857\/","title":{"rendered":"Fire destroys sawmill building in northwestern Berks"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A building at a Bethel Township sawmill went up in flames Tuesday.<\/p>\n<p>Crews were called about 11:15 a.m. to Ritchie Logging &amp; Sawmill, 9340 Old Route 22, for a report of a structure fire.<\/p>\n<p>The first crew to arrive reported the building was fully aflame, said Jay Zimmerman, Bethel Fire Company assistant chief.<\/p>\n<p>They needed only about 30 minutes to put out the bulk of the flames but spent about three hours more putting out hot spots and mopping up, he said.<\/p>\n<p>The building burned to the ground. It was used to produce wood shavings for agricultural bedding, Zimmerman said.<\/p>\n<p>No one was injured.<\/p>\n<p>The source of the fire was likely furnaces used for drying the material, although the cause remains undetermined, he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A building at a Bethel Township sawmill went up in flames Tuesday. Crews were called about 11:15 a.m.&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":25842,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[349,182,139,28,128,130,129,6056],"class_list":{"0":"post-25857","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-reading","8":"tag-berks-county","9":"tag-local-news","10":"tag-news","11":"tag-pennsylvania","12":"tag-reading-city","13":"tag-reading-city-headlines","14":"tag-reading-city-news","15":"tag-top-stories-rhr"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25857","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25857"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25857\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25842"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25857"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25857"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25857"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}