Suspicious Fire Burns Down Shed In Washington St. Industrial District [VIDEO]

Editor's note: This article was updated with additional information and video on Monday at 9:50 p.m.

A small storage shed at the rear of the industrial district on Washington Street burned down on early Monday evening, the latest in a string of suspicious fires at the soon-to-be redeveloped industrial site.

By 6:30 p.m., —who first responded shortly before 6 p.m. to the fire—had extinguished any flames and were soaking down the smoking tree limbs just behind where the 10-by-20 foot shed once stood, adjacent to the MBTA commuter rail tracks.

The shed had already been consumed by the fire by the time Engine 3, the first company to respond, arrived on scene, according to Melrose Fire Capt. Ed Collina.

"There appears to be some evidence that a squatter might have been living in it (the shed)—the condiments and some other food materials you can see among the debris," Collina said. "(The fire) definitely started inside the structure."

Collina, who is the department's fire prevention officer, said that the industrial district has been the site of a few suspicious outside fires during the past two months.

The radiant heat also caused the vinyl siding on an adjacent garage to melt, and embers also caused a fire on an old loading dock along the commuter rail tracks approximately 50 yards away at the end of Stone Place.

"There's an old wooden deck from the off-loading of the trains from the early 1900s, as trains would come up and off-load heavy timber alongside the tracks," Collina said. "That had caught fire in and among the vegetation that has overgrown over the years. The fire started to progress northerly down the tracks."

Melrose Fire Engine 1 and a Malden Fire truck, which had been called in for backup, helped extinguish that fire, but the deck began smoking just after the firefighters had finished up, requiring them to return and douse the dock again.