Two fires: quick response quells barn and truck blazes

The vehicle fire proved most time consuming for fire agencies, not to douse the flames, but for cleanup.

On Sunday night, a commercial vehicle was heading westbound on I-84, hauling crushed cars en route to a scrapyard, when one of the cars in the midst of the heap caught fire.

Fire agencies responded at about 10 p.m. to the scene at I-84 milepost 61, just west of Hood River.

Crews had to call in a tow truck and pull the hunk of car remains off the trailer, West Side Fire Marshal Jim Trammell said.

After officials doused the fire, workers had to forklift “the mess” back onto a trailer and clean up the scene — which kept crews busy until Monday afternoon.

I-84 westbound was closed for about 45 minutes. Oregon Department of Transportation and Oregon State Police helped seal off both lanes while workers toiled at the roadside scene.

A possible cause was truck exhaust igniting, Trammel said, but fire agencies didn’t investigate the matter extensively at the time because the first priority was removing the truck from the roadway.

Local fire agencies had a smoother experience subduing the barn fire, which flared up Monday morning at a property in the 1200 block of Tucker Road, just across from West Side Fire station.

West Side staffers heard reports of white smoke pluming from the barn’s floor level at sometime around 6 a.m., and by the time they reached the property, it was turning brown.

“In most cases a barn fire would have been a defensive fire attack,” Lt. Josh Beckner of West Side Fire said, but the department’s proximity to the scene allowed firefighters to hose down the blaze from outside within 10 minutes. They then entered the structure on foot to polish it off.

Nobody was injured in the blaze, nor were the chickens in coops on the property. Beckner summed up the results as “minimal damage” given the nature of the fire, though a patch of flooring in the barn had to be torn out.

“We were fairly lucky … another 10 or 15 minutes and the (barn) would have been involved,” Trammel said.

The official cause was not determined as of Monday night, but Trammel said it was likely electrical, sparked from heating lamps for livestock in the barn.

All Hood River Valley fire departments joined West Side. Even Cascade Locks Fire was on standby.

Tucker Road was closed for several hours, and crews remained on scene for clean up until early afternoon Monday.