Tobacco butt sparked fire that transformed Joensuu riverfront

A cigarette butt thrown by young people sparked a major fire at a sawmill in Joensuu in 1996, ultimately paving the way for the transformation of a contaminated industrial area into the award-winning Penttilänranta residential district, Yle reports.

The fire left 25 hectares of heavily contaminated land along the Pielisjoki river. In the late 2000s, the city cleaned up the area and moved more than 900,000 tonnes of contaminated soil.

On August 18, 1996, a group of children under the age of 15 gathered at the abandoned sawmill site. The sawmill had closed eight years earlier, but the young people visited the area despite a ban on being there.

Some of them were smoking. One of the children threw a cigarette butt beside the wall of a wooden sawmill building, setting dry grass smouldering. The boys urinated on the grass and thought they had put out the fire before leaving for a swimming beach.

They had not. The fire rapidly spread through the sawmill, which had been built in 1918. When firefighters arrived, the building was already doomed and collapsed just over 30 minutes after the emergency centre received the first report.

The flames were so intense that people on the other side of the river could feel the heat on their faces. Crowds gathered to watch, blocking the bridges across the Pielisjoki. Flames were reflected in the upper-floor windows of apartment buildings in central Joensuu, more than a kilometre away, prompting false reports of fires in the city centre.

Impregnated wood burned at the sawmill, while the ground contained various toxic substances left behind by the sawmill industry. Around 10 firefighters fell ill after inhaling toxic gases.

By the following morning, only smoking ruins, 25 hectares of contaminated land and widespread dismay remained. Before the fire, plans had been advanced to preserve the culturally and historically valuable sawmill as a place where the history of Finland’s sawmill industry could be presented.

The city had already begun planning to turn the riverfront into a residential area before the fire. The first plans were drawn up as a diploma project by architecture student Juha-Pekka Vartiainen, who later became Joensuu’s head of town planning for nearly 25 years.

Vartiainen’s vision was a dense, modern district close to the city centre, where residents would not necessarily need their own cars and as many homes as possible would have views of the river.

At the time, the area opposite the city centre was largely wasteland. In addition to the sawmill, the old industrial district contained a couple of slaughterhouses and a wholesale business. Joensuu also had a serious racism problem, and local skinheads used club premises in Penttilä.

Reconstruction of Penttilänranta only properly began more than a decade after the fire. The district is expected to be completed in the 2040s, with a bridge to the city centre identified as a key factor in its development.