Firefighters battle a blaze involving Pi Brick Oven Trattoria, The Vermont Standard, and The Collective in Woodstock on Monday, July 16, 2018. Double and triple roofs on some parts of the buildings made fighting the fire challenging. (Valley News - August Frank) Copyright Valley News. May not be reprinted or used online without permission. Send requests to permission@vnews.com.
Firefighters battle a blaze involving Pi Brick Oven Trattoria, The Vermont Standard, and The Collective in Woodstock on Monday, July 16, 2018. Double and triple roofs on some parts of the buildings made fighting the fire challenging. (Valley News - August Frank) Copyright Valley News. May not be reprinted or used online without permission. Send requests to permission@vnews.com. Credit: Valley News — August Frank

We know that publishing a newspaper takes hard work, a supportive community, a fair amount of coffee and a little bit of luck. And that’s when things go according to plan. They don’t always, of course. As Mike Tyson famously observed: “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”

Our colleagues at the Vermont Standard got punched in the mouth last week when a fire heavily damaged the weekly newspaper’s offices on Central Street in Woodstock. The blaze, which also destroyed a pizza restaurant and damaged a craft gallery and an occupied apartment in the same building, started at about 3:30 in the morning on Monday, July 16, and sparked and smoked for much of the rest of the sweltering, 90-degree day. Firefighters from 17 different departments responded. Two were treated for heat exhaustion, but no other injuries were reported.

The 165-year-old weekly publishes on Thursdays. Needless to say, watching their office go up in flames four days before deadline wasn’t part of the Standard staff’s plan. But the point Tyson, a former heavyweight boxing champion (and no stranger to conflict and controversy), was trying to make is this: It’s not your plan that’s important; it’s how you respond when your plan is reduced to smoking ash.

The staff of the Vermont Standard responded magnificently.

“I will promise you,” owner Phillip Camp Sr. said before the fire was even extinguished, “this newspaper will print this week.”

And it did, offering its readers not only an extensive package of stories and photographs from the fire, but also its usual business, sports and entertainment sections and a full roster of other features.

The Woodstock community responded magnificently, as well, rallying around the Standard and the other affected businesses. The Norman Williams Public Library offered the Standard staff a place to work, for example, while other downtown businesses supplied refreshments and restroom facilities for the firefighters and even storage space for works rescued from the damaged gallery. (This despite the recent hardship many downtown businesses faced while the Central Street bridge over Kedron Brook was replaced.)

“The community always plays a huge role in what we do here at the Standard,” editor Gareth Henderson wrote, “and, this week, we could never have published this newspaper without the amazing help we received from the community in the aftermath of Monday’s fire.”

It’s worth noting that this wasn’t the Standard’s first brush with disaster. In August 2011, Tropical Storm Irene flooded the newspaper’s offices, which were then in West Woodstock. That catastrophe — which took place on a Sunday — didn’t prevent the newspaper from publishing that week, either. “That was the dress rehearsal for today,” Camp said.

Case in point: The Standard staff was wisely storing backup materials in a fireproof safe, which firefighters were able to retrieve and which helped the staff produce last week’s edition.

So, while no one at the Standard planned to watch their office burn down, they were prepared when it did.

Which brings to mind another famous observation, this one from President Dwight D. Eisenhower: “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.”