(Kingsbury, IN) - A building used for storing farm chemicals and other products worked as designed to limit fire damage at Kingsbury Elevator Monday night.
A police officer who noticed the fire while out on patrol also kept the damage to a minimum.
According to La Porte County Police, at about 9:30 p.m. Deputy Scott Lanoue was northbound on U.S. 35 when he observed what appeared to be a fire at the elevator. He then drove onto the property and found a small fire coming from a storage cabinet attached to the inside of the roughly 100 X 40-foot pole barn.
The officer then contacted a 911 dispatcher, who notified firefighters.
La Porte County Police Officer Jonathon Sikorski also responded to assist, using a fire extinguisher from his patrol vehicle to try and reach the flames inside the cabinet. However, he was ultimately unable to get close enough with his extinguisher to put out the flames.
A short time later, police said, responding volunteer firefighters from Kingsbury, Kingsford-Union and Scipio Township forced their way inside through a main door at a different location of the building. They wound up cutting into the metal exterior of the structure to reach and extinguish the fire.
La Porte County Hazmat Director Jeff Hamilton said the structure contained multiple 330-gallon containers of diesel exhaust fluid alongside insecticides, herbicides, pesticides, and some fertilizer.
Hamilton said that diesel exhaust fluid on pieces of heavy machinery like semi-trucks is kept in separate tanks on the vehicles. The liquid is automatically injected into the emissions so the exhaust burns hotter and comes out cleaner. The liquid never posed a danger, though, because it’s made of two-thirds water and one-third urea, a mineral that serves as the flammable ingredient in the fluid.
He said the fluid, along with the petroleum-based farm chemicals, could have ignited had the structure fire burned hot enough, but the flames were too small to generate such heat and at low risk of spreading much.
Hamilton noted that the risk of a major advancing fire was kept down from the structure being all metal, except for the wooden support beams inside the building.
“With hardly any wood on the inside of the building because of it being a basic pole barn the chances of that happening would have been very slim,” he said.
Hamilton also noted there was never any threat of an explosion because of how difficult it was for the fire to spread and the stored chemicals not being highly combustible.
No light was shed on the cause of the fire.
According to police, a recently-hired independent contractor was completing some electrical work on the building and placing new receptacles on the inside to store diesel exhaust fluid.
