Westlock County firefighters put in a full day’s work last Saturday battling a vehicle fire north of Tawatinaw.
On Sept. 6, 13 members from the Westlock Rural and Pickardville fire departments responded to a call at 6:30 p.m. of a tractor trailer on fire on Highway 2, approximately 1.6 km north of Tawatinaw.
County fire chief John Biro saw the trailer contained 180 bales of ditch erosion mats, which are made of tightly woven coconut fibres.
“It was a dirty fire, extremely difficult to extinguish,” he said.
Firefighters were on scene for about eight hours, and used close to 13,000 litres of water to put it out. The bales and the trailer were completely destroyed; the truck cab was disconnected and was not damaged.
No one was injured in the blaze.
Biro said the cause of the fire is undermined.
“There’s a possibility either a hot object was expelled from a passing vehicle that happened to land into the bale stack, or it could have been something from the truck itself — it could have been carbon from the exhaust or something from the cab,” he said. “It’s basically undetermined due to the fact nothing was left of the contents, as well as the trailer.”
The fire closed Highway 2 completely for a short time while crews got in place to fight the blaze, but it was opened to allow one lane of traffic through shortly thereafter.
While the burning bales was one concern firefighters had to deal with, Biro said the surrounding environment posed its own problems.
“We did have a breeze as well that was spreading fire into the east ditch,” he said.
Not only was there the concern over the fire spreading into the ditch, he said there was also standing grain crop to worry about.
The fire was finally extinguished and the highway cleared by around 1 a.m., Biro said, and firefighters were back at the hall and back in service by 3 a.m. Sunday morning.
