UPDATE: Fire destroys school room in Cambridge church

A Cambridge church may never be the same after a fire caused hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages Wednesday night.

“It’s tough for anything and anybody, but when it’s a church, it’s even harder,” says Rescue Fire Company PIO Ricky Travers.

The blaze broke out Wednesday evening at the Cambridge Church of the Nazarene. The devastating damages are estimated at $600,000.

Patricia McNamara, a Cambridge resident, told 47 ABC, “On the side where they have a daycare, it was blazing.”

Around 6:30PM close to 60 firefighters from 14 different fire departments across the Eastern Shore battled flames for close to two and a half hours. Their plan of attack? Flooding the church’s sanctuary from above.

Travers says, “We had large amounts of fire and we had to quiet it down and try to cut it off in the main sanctuary . . . We needed large volumes of water. It was an extremely hot fire once we got here because it had opened up through the roof.”

One firefighter was treated for heat illness, beyond that, no injuries were reported. Investigators say the fire destroyed a classroom in the back of the church which was not equipped with sprinklers.

The cause of the fire is still under investigation by the Maryland State Fire Marshal’s Office.