This wasn’t a cause for celebration.

Massachusetts firefighters were left scrambling this weekend when an inadvertent fireworks display erupted over a massive, propane-fueled blaze that destroyed two suburban homes and damaged a third.

Crews in Spencer, Mass., were already battling arctic 20-degree temperatures, dangerously icy conditions and a brutal inferno that exploded on East Avenue at about 4 p.m. on Sunday, CBS News said.

But the mammoth blaze — which was fed by propane tanks stored in the basement of one of the homes destroyed — wasn’t the only problem.

At one point, the flames reached an assortment of fireworks stored in the home — sending a grandiose spectacle leaping in all directions across the skies of the tiny town about a half-hour west of Worcester.

Video taken by a neighbor and published by CBS showed the fireworks streaming skyward, then bursting as shocked onlookers yelled in surprise.

“The main house, we didn’t even do anything with initially,” Spencer Fire Chief Robert Parsons told WCVB in Massachusetts. “It was well-involved when we pulled up.”

The home was empty when the fire started, officials said.

“Very quickly, this home had collapsed upon itself,” Parsons said. “This was an old home. It had a fire here about 30 years ago, so there was an old section and a new section to the home. We believe it started in the old section.”

Later on, the local fire department said in a Facebook post that “two of our families from town lost everything tonight and a third had damage to their home.”

“It’s devastating before Christmas,” said Justin Peck, who lived in the second home. “It just feels like everything’s falling apart.”

Two firefighters even fell through the ice of a nearby pond as they tried to pull water from its depths, since there are no fire hydrants in the area, officials said.

Despite the catastrophic property damage, no one was hurt by the flames, the icy conditions or the impromptu Independence Day display.

Local authorities and the state fire marshal are still trying to nail down what caused the blaze.

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When it comes to producing new jobs, Massachusetts is putt-putt-putting along in the slow lane. We’re doing 40 miles per hour on the Pike with the hazards flashing as other states blow past.

The state’s job market is decelerating, underscoring a concern shared by many in the business community that myriad factors are eroding the state’s competitive edge. It’s not just the new millionaires tax — though there’s plenty of griping about that — but also issues that dishearten low- and middle-income residents: sky-high housing costs, unaffordable child care, and long commutes, to name a few.

The news: Massachusetts employers expanded payrolls by 27,100 jobs, an uptick of 0.7 percent, from November 2023 to November 2024, according to US Department of Labor data released on Friday. The total includes a paltry 800 jobs added last month, but at least that broke a four-month string of losses.

• In New England, only Connecticut saw a slower hiring rate (0.6 percent) over the past 12 months. In New Hampshire, jobs increased by 2.1 percent, while Rhode Island posted a 1.7 percent gain.
• Hiring rates in states that are considered key competitors outpaced Massachusetts. New York, North Carolina, and Florida were each up 1.7 percent, while Texas was up 2 percent.

A telling stat: Our state has roughly the same number of jobs as it did in February 2020, just before the pandemic hit. Nationally, payrolls have risen 4.6 percent.

Why it matters: Massachusetts, a graying state with high business costs and a modestly growing population, has trailed the nation’s job creation rate for much of this century.

The labor market is cooling across the country. But the expansion of remote work since the pandemic, an ever-rising cost of living, and the widening appeal of the Sun Belt states threaten to put Massachusetts even farther behind.

Meanwhile, unemployment is rising, hitting 4 percent in Massachusetts last month, the highest in three years. Massachusetts is just 0.1 percentage point below the national rate, down from a gap of 1 percentage point in May.

The big picture: The state’s economy is solid, but cracks in the foundation are becoming more visible.

• Hiring in the past year was narrowly concentrated, with two-thirds of new jobs coming from health care and more than a quarter from government.
• The leisure and hospitality sector added 5,700 jobs. But gains in hotels and restaurants were muted by the disappearance of 4,000 jobs (4.6 percent) in arts, entertainment, and recreation.
• The information sector — which includes software and Web developers, telecom engineers, and cybersecurity specialists — shed 4,100 jobs, or 4.3 percent of its total.
• Education lost 1,600 jobs, a small hit (less than 1 percent) that nonetheless doesn’t bode well for an important sector that includes beleaguered private colleges and universities.

What’s ahead: The new year may prove pivotal for the economy.

President-elect Donald Trump is seeking to pump up growth with tax cuts and deregulation.

But the Federal Reserve is treading carefully with additional interest rate cuts, worried that Trump’s agenda, which also includes steep tariffs and sharp restrictions on immigration, might fan inflation.

Whether the job market stabilizes or continues to deteriorate hinges in part on how adeptly the Fed can push inflation lower without throttling the economy.

Final thought: In Massachusetts, the hiring slowdown has coincided with a spike in the number of people entering the labor force, largely due to international immigration, both legal and illegal.

Some 73,000 residents landed work in the past year, the Labor Department data show. But the ranks of the unemployed rose by more than 29,000 to more than 153,000 — a combination of workers who were laid off, quit, or are new job-seekers.

There’s not much Governor Maura Healey and the Legislature can do about inflation and interest rates. But they can hit the gas when it comes to making Massachusetts a more attractive place to create jobs.

Larry Edelman can be reached at larry.edelman@globe.com.

Gov. Maura Healey pledged that the cost of running emergency shelters housing migrants and locals would decrease from its historic levels and pushed back on conservatives who have labeled Massachusetts a “sanctuary state” harboring illegal immigrants.

In an end-of-year interview with the Herald ahead of her third year in office, Healey cast blame on the federal government for immigration issues in the Bay State, but said the expected $1 billion tab taxpayers are set to carry in each of the next several years will eventually deflate.

“It’s going to go down,” she said from inside the State House. “This is not a permanent situation, and it certainly is not sustainable, which is why I felt comfortable making the policy decisions that I have made to ratchet down the numbers.”

Only migrants who are legally allowed or paroled into the United States can access the emergency shelter system, which Healey has placed a set of increasingly restrictive changes on ever since she declared a state of emergency in August 2023 amid an influx of migrants.

The restrictions, including a 7,500 family cap on the system and limiting length of stays, appear to have had some effect. State officials reported spending less on state-run shelters in fiscal year 2024 than originally anticipated — $856 million rather than $932 million.

The cost is still above the $325 million the state has historically spent on emergency assistance shelters, which were set up under a 1980s law to house homeless families with children and pregnant women.

Arriving migrants and the money spent to take care of them have become a flashpoint on Beacon Hill, where Republicans routinely tried this year to implement residency requirements on shelters and cut back spending.

Top budget writers working for Healey are expected to ask the Legislature to approve another round of spending early in the new year to cover shelters for the remainder of fiscal year 2025. Without another injection of cash, money is expected to dry up in January, officials have said.

Sen. Ryan Fattman, a Sutton Republican, said even though new arrivals “forced” Healey to cut shelter costs and reduce the number of families relying on state aid, that has not stopped her from asking for more dollars to fund the system.

“The cost is overwhelming,” he told the Herald in an interview this past month. “In my opinion, what cost containment looks like is reforming the amount of time that people from out of state coming into the state can stay. You want to say 30 or 60 days? Okay, that’s a good reform.”

Healey said the measures she has taken are working — though they have faced harsh criticism from some advocates — and are buoyed by the fact that 65% of families who have recently sought shelter from the state are from Massachusetts.

“We’re not a sanctuary state,” Healey said. “We have a limited budget, and the emergency shelter system really was meant for Massachusetts families who were experiencing homelessness or housing insecurity and needed a place to go that was temporary.

“We’re trying to get to that place where emergency shelter is temporary and that it’s really there just for a limited purpose for a family,” the governor added.

But even as Healey touts her changes to state-run shelters, she has started to face a wave of conservative criticism for running what Republicans say is a “sanctuary state” just as President-elect Donald Trump has promised to undertake mass deportations when he takes office next year.

The term “sanctuary state” generally refers to a state or municipality’s willingness to offer more protection to undocumented immigrants.

But just because a city or town in Massachusetts considers itself a “sanctuary” does not mean there is no federal immigration enforcement, said Sarah Sherman-Stokes, associate director of Boston University’s Immigrants’ Rights and Human Trafficking Clinic.

“There are gaps between some of the statewide laws and city policies that remain vulnerable and will still feed non-citizens into ICE custody,” Stokes told the Herald.

In Massachusetts, many point to a 2017 ruling from the Supreme Judicial Court that bars state and local police from detaining a person solely on the basis of their immigration status, a decision that has since been used to prohibit interactions with federal immigration officials.

Healey said she believes “violent criminals should be deported if they’re not here lawfully” and that local, state, and federal law enforcement should work together to investigate and prosecute crimes and remove people from the country who are criminals.

But the first-term Democrat said she does not back “showing up at a hotel, and rounding up groups of people who are suspected to be here unlawfully, who are here working, and just deporting all of them without a process.”

Healey said, “I think what we need to do is work together here in Massachusetts to do both things: investigate, hold accountable, deport as necessary folks who are here unlawfully, who’ve engaged in criminal activity, absolutely, and also stand up for and protect the people who have been working here, going to school here, raising kids here, to ensure that they are not scared to go to the doctors or drop their kids off or school or go to work.”