April 13, 2008
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FIRE!!!!!
Now that I have your attention—– lol
Our son in town, Greg, is superintendent of a local golf course.
There is an old house and garage that has been near the entrance since the course was built. The club rented the house out.
Guess it had deteriorated so badly, that it wasn’t worth fixing up anymore. So the club contacted the rural fire department there and asked them if they would like to use it for a training burn.
Greg can correct this if I get anything wrong.
I think he said it ended up with 7 different fire departments and the technical college being involved.
Last fall already, Greg and his crew had taken down several trees close to the house. Since the house had aluminum siding on it, that was removed, and the rural fire department turned it in for recycling.
Early Saturday morning they all converged on the country club. We had sleety snow all day long, and some pretty good winds. This picture had to be made smaller, but the trucks go way down the hill in the distance. The pump trucks got water from the river right by the course.
Most of the morning was spent in training. Greg said they set about 4 small fires in the house, and various groups went in and put them out.
They set the garage on fire first. Greg said the wood was so old that it only took about 15 minutes for it to burn down.
This picture must be of one of the small training burns in the main house. The garage on the left is not on fire yet.
Here, both buildings are going.
Fire shooting out both ends of the attic of the house.
The house fully engulfed.
House collapsed, and fire almost out. You can see that the only thing that held together was the metal roof.
Tomorrow, a bulldozer will come in and remove the debris, fill in the basement and level off the ground.
Daughter-in-law, Lori, took the 3 younger kids out there to watch the burn. The head fire chief came over and picked 5 yr-old Linden up and took him right over to the house just after they started the fire, so Linden could see the fire burning inside the house. He was so excited!! Three guesses what he has now decided to be when he grows up.
The local paper covered the burn, too. If any of you are interested, there are a LOT (72) more pictures of the whole process—along with group pictures of all the firemen involved. It also has a good picture of all the trucks with their hoses all over the road, either loading up with water from the river, or when they were using the hoses on the smaller fires. Just click on “House Burn” below.
Comments (18)
Cool pictures! It must be the season for house burning because our local departments burned a vacant farmhouse not to far from me last weekend to make way for soccer and baseball fields.
Amazing photos – I’m glad it was a deliberate burn. The photo with the metal roof remnants is pretty cool/
Hope they got lots of good training!
Did anybody bring marshmallows? : )
All I saw was the FIRE…scared me silly for a minute. Glad the g-son now knows what he is going to be when he grows up. lol
they did that in our community. someone bought a lot of parcels with old homes on it, they let the fire department have them to burn. thanks for stopping by.
Even controlled burns are scary
Have sent email 
Lotsa learning in doing that. They do that here too. Now SEE!?!?!?! A while back, you said you weren’t going to write any more for a while. Said you didn’t have anything interesting. If you’d done THAT, we’d have misset THIS!!! And I thought it was interesting!! (o;
Great photos. Judi
What a good idea your son had to invite the fire bridge to use the old building for a training ground. Linden got to do what every little boy dreams of doing with his ride on the engine
The photos are awesome! God bless the firefighters.
Talk about being realistic!!!!! Just as I opened your post about the fire and the pictures popped up a fire truck went by right outside with its siren and horn blaring. I almost ran to look out the door at your fires!!! LOL
Exciting but I’m sure a real house fire must be very frightening. When I was teaching the Fire Service visited the school regularly and the kids loved the fire engine so I’m sure many of them planned to be a Fireman.
marie
uh….PASS!
How exciting! I would have loved to have my nephew Pierce see that. He is only 8 y/o but he has always said that he wanted to be a fireman! We shall see if that happens!!
Very cool pics and great training!
Those are a whole lot of fire trucks. I’m not surprised that they do this sort of stuff for practice/training. But still there has to be an element of danger involved. Good pictures.
I like your pretty spring banner.
RYC: Baby goat? Cabrito. I’ve never heard of it. I like goat cheese so I guess I would try goat meat. Why not? It does sound kind of exotic. I like baby lamb when it is on a gyro. So baby goat would be fun to sample.
really spectacular !! WOW !
Michel
I’ll skip the link. Something about the loss of a house, good cause or not makes me feel ill.
And you say nothing exciting ever happens there!