While the fire that started at a Dudley industrial equipment supplier Thursday night destroyed its main building, Dudley Fire Chief Dean Kochanowski said it could have been a lot worse.

Mace Polymers & Additives Inc on Roberts Road has four large tanks of isopropyl alcohol on its property, along with a secondary building that contains chemicals, Kochanowski said Friday.

Responding firefighters were able to keep the tanks cool and the fire from moving to the secondary building, he said.

Keeping those tanks of very flammable liquid and the secondary building from catching fire resulted in a much better outcome, Kochanowski said.

“If the fire had gotten to them there probably would have been injuries, maybe even deaths of first responders,” he said. “My crews and mutual aid crews did an excellent job protecting those two key pieces.”

The Dudley Fire Department received a call Thursday night from a neighbor of Mace Polymers & Additives reporting an outside fire.

When firefighters arrived at the scene at 9:41 p.m., they saw fire coming out of the doors and windows of the company’s main building.

Over the course of the night, the fire rose to a fifth-alarm and Kochanowski said fire crews didn’t have a good handle on it until 3 or 4 a.m.

Responding to the fire was very difficult, according to the chief, because it happened outside of the hydrant district so they had to bring tanker shuttles with water to the scene.

The supplier’s driveway was also on a narrow uphill slope, which meant responders had to pump water to the top of a slope.

The nature of the business also proved difficult for firefighters.

“We had a few explosions during the course of the fire, an external wall collapse,” Kochanowski said.

Since the factory makes polymers and wax emulsion, Kochanowski said he brought in a state Hazardous Materials team to conduct air monitoring tests.

Those tests came back clear and there wasn’t any hazardous runoff from the building.

Between the Dudley Fire Department and mutual aid crews, Kochanowski said 80 to 100 firefighters responded to the blaze.

Kochanowski said he cleared the scene of the overnight fire himself at around 10 a.m.

“The main building is a total loss due to the sheer volume of fire and heat ... it collapsed in on itself,” he said. Firefighters needed an excavator to go through the building and wet down any hot spots.

There were no injuries in the fire. The investigation into the cause of the fire just started, according to Kochanowski.

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