Two fires in two days.
Putnam County Fire Department firefighters fought a barn fire Thursday evening and a boat fire Friday morning, according to Fire Chief Thomas McClain. No one was injured in either incident.
The call for the boat fire came in Friday morning while firefighters were still monitoring the burned barn to ensure it didn’t rekindle and spread to a nearby trailer loaded with hay, McClain said.
“These things rarely happen as singles; usually there’s two or three,” he noted.
It all started at 7:37 p.m. Thursday, when the fire department received a call reporting a barn on fire on U.S. Hwy. 441 south, “at the end of the straightaway just before you get to Twin Bridges and Pea Ridge,” McClain described.
“It was fully-involved when we arrived,” McClain said. “The barn was a total loss, including the big farm tractors and hay baler inside of it; they were lost, too.”
Eatonton Fire Department assisted with its 3,000-gallon tanker truck. McClain said Putnam County Fire Department’s tankers were used as well. Each of those hold 1,000 gallons.
“But we used way more than that,” he said. “We’d have to go back and refill the tankers and bring them back to the fire because there’s no fire extinguishers there.”
McClain said he didn’t have a count of how many times they refilled each tanker, “but we used a lot of water and we had to bring it all in.” The cause of the fire has not yet been determined, he added.
Several firefighters and a truck stayed throughout the night and morning, as previously mentioned.
The boat fire was reported at 10:39 a.m. Friday. The boat was in Lake Sinclair off the 100 block of Woodhaven Drive. When talking with the newspaper, McClain said he didn’t know what kind of boat it was because it was totally burned up when he arrived on scene.
He said the boat was adrift near a dock when firefighters arrived. McClain didn’t know who called it in or if anyone had been on the boat when the fire started.
“With the combined efforts of our ground suppression team and those on our fire boat, we were able to extinguish it and DNR was notified,” McClain said.