A fire that started Wednesday morning, severely damaged Baker City’s historic Central Building school.

The 108-year-old building was empty.

It has not been used as a school since 2009.

Buzz Harper, chief of the Keating Rural Fire District, said the building was “gutted.”

He said that although the risk of the fire spreading was all but over by 1:30 p.m., the building is likely to smolder for days.

The roof started to collapse relatively early, Harper said.

He estimated flames 60 feet high were extending from the building. Because the situation was so dangerous, with the roof falling in, and because the building is vacant, firefighters stayed outside to fight the fire, pouring hundreds of thousands of gallons of water on the structure, Harper said.

The Baker City Fire Department, the first of many agencies to respond, arrived around 6:35 a.m. Smoke was pouring from the southwest side and part of the roof of the 57,000-square-foot, three-story structure at the time.

As of 2 p.m., neither the fire department nor the Oregon State Fire Marshal’s Office had released any information about a potential cause for the fire.

Baker City Manager Barry Murphy said investigators will start their work once firefighters are finished.

The Central Building was constructed in 1916 and opened in 1917 as Baker High School. It served as the high school until 1952.

The school district used the building as part of the middle school campus for several decades before closing it in 2009.