Difficult fire at Wellman Dynamics

The combination of not being able to use water and a ceiling fire 35 feet in the air made for a difficult day for the Creston Fire Department.

The call of a fire came in from Wellman Dynamics just before 10 a.m. Friday.

“Wellman had a small fire in the roof over the magnesium burner,” Creston Fire Chief Todd Jackson said. “There’s an exhaust vent in the roof, about 35 ft high, up in there. We think it was caused by electrical feeding the fan there at the vent.”

The fire itself was a Class A, the most common type of fire involving solid materials such as wood, paper, fabric and some plastics. However, the presence of the magnesium burner below limited their options.

Upon contact with burning magnesium, water will produce hydrogen gas that will only intensify the fire. In addition, since magnesium burns in the presence of carbon dioxide, a CO2 fire extinguisher does not put out the flame from burning magnesium; a dry-chemical fire extinguisher must be used instead.

“When we decided it was going to have to go out of the roof, we upped our response,” Jackson said.

An aid request was paged to Afton, Lenox and Osceola fire departments.

“We tried to reach it from the inside,” Jackson explained. “The fire was between the ceiling and roof. We had to get on the roof to cut it out.”

When there became a concern about the structural integrity of the roof, plans had to change. They used the platform truck from Osceola to access the roof. Once ventilated, flames shot out the roof.

“It’s kind of difficult to fight those fires without using water,” Jackson said. “It took a while because of all the issues — the roof structure and the fact we couldn’t use water. If it were a normal fire, we would have showed up and had it out in 30 minutes, but the way it was, it was time consuming.”

Union County Emergency Management and Greater Regional Medics also responded.

“It was a good effort with minimal damage,” Jackson said. “It wasn’t a huge fire, just a difficult fire.”