Storage units and contents destroyed in weekend fire

Firefighters and equipment from five different counties responded to a storage unit fire in Minocqua on Saturday, July 26. 

Minocqua fire chief Rich Carani said he and some of his firefighters and trucks were at the Woodruff fire department’s Hog and Hops fundraising event when the call came through.

“We had just finished our first round (of water fights) that we lost,” he said. “I walked over to my chair to sit down and took my coat off and then my pager went off, calling us out for a structure fire.”

The proximity to the fire at the time to what was the report of smoke coming from one of the large storage units in a block of 13 units at LNK Rentals on State Highway 47 not far from the intersection with County Highway J resulted in a quick response and the opportunity to assess the situation and activate the Mutual Aid Box Alarm System (MABAS). 

“When we got there, the entire unit had smoke coming out of it from the north end to the south end so the fire was well involved before we even got there,” Carani said. “We set up our typical water supply and started pulling lines to make an attack on the fire.”

The hot weather was definitely a factor for the firefighters and rehabilitation, or rehab, for personnel became a real concern. 

“Obviously, on Saturday we had temperatures close to 90 degrees and it was pretty humid,” Carani said. “Working in turnout gear with air packs, it was pretty difficult even for people who are in pretty good shape so guys were getting tired pretty quick and needed rehab, rehydration and rest. 

“The initial crews, within 15 or 20 minutes, were pretty spent and we had them in rehab,” Carini added.

Because more personnel and resources were needed, Carani made the decision to “immediately” activate the MABAS. 

“Shortly thereafter, I upgraded to a third level MABAS alarm just because of how fast the guys were getting tired and we had to cycle in new people,” he said.

Carani said once the third level was engaged, “the state MABAS people started reaching out.”

Eventually, by going to what he said is the MABAS’s “interdivisional level” there were firefighters and equipment called in from Oneida, Vilas, Price, Lincoln and Marathon counties and what they were up against was no easy task. 

“Because it’s a metal building, it was difficult to access,” Carani said. “Obviously, the water is going to run off it so we initially didn’t have areas to get into. We had to do some cutting with saws to access the fire.”

He said once the fire got into the roof it burned across the storage unit “from one side to the other.”

“As that fire was burning across dropping into all of the storage units, the equipment and stuff that was in those units started on fire,” Carani said. “We had vehicles, snowmobiles, UTVs (utility task vehicles), a full size camper, tractors, skidsteer loaders, fuel, a race car ... there was all kinds of equipment and fuels and plastics. It just made it more difficult to extinguish the fire.”

An excavator with Schrom’s Excavating was brought in “relatively quickly” and the building was pulled apart “so we could access and extinguish the fire.”

“Toward the end of the day, the guys were pretty worn out so we ended up using elevated master streams from ladder trucks to kind of help us,” Carani said. “Once we had the roof and walls opened up, that actually worked out pretty good using the (ladder) trucks.”

According to a Minocqua Fire Department Facebook post, nearly 30 different agencies were involved in the response. Departments from the Rhinelander area that responded to the scene included Rhinelander, Newbold, Pelican, Pine Lake, Crescent, Sugar Camp, Stella, Cassian, Three Lakes and Monico.

He said the cause of the fire is under investigation, an investigation that includes people who had items in the destroyed storage units. 

“We have video footage prior to our arrival so we can pretty much see which unit it started in,” Carani said. “Talk to those people and see what they had stored in there.”

He said the building with the storage units had power. 

“They usually don’t have power,” Carani said and while he acknowledged a cause for the fire may never be determined, the power to the storage facility at least “gives us another ignition source that we can look into.”

“Whether it was some type of electrical issue or not,” he said. “I don’t know yet and I don’t know if we’ll ever know because it’s pretty much gone.”

As for the operation itself and the coordination of all the personnel from so many different fire departments, Carani said the MABAS “was designed to prevent headaches.”

“You have pre-determined resources that are called and we all work under the incident command system,” he said. “Everybody’s pretty familiar with that and when you get on-scene, your company checks in and you’re given an assignment, you rotate through tasks and rehab, through staging and all these different areas so as far as coordination and command and control, as chaotic as it looked, it was actually pretty organized.”

Brian Jopek may be reached via email at [email protected].