ANTIGO — A vehicle unexpectedly erupted into an inferno Sunday morning in the Walmart parking lot, burning almost completely to the frame until being extinguished by responding firefighters.
According to a report filed by the Antigo Fire Department about the incident, the fire was quelled less than five minutes after their personnel arrived on the scene.
“The van was kind of in the middle of the parking lot — luckily there were no other cars around the area,” said Antigo Fire Department Lt. Adam Finn. “Most of the fire was definitely in the engine compartment. It was kind of working its way back to the passenger compartment. Definitely smoke and flames were coming out of it. We just hit it with our inch and three quarter attack line that we use on the truck for fires like that and probably flowed maybe 200 gallons of water and put it out, and that’s kind of all she wrote.”
Louis Derks, the vehicle’s driver, said nearly immediately after he parked, he realized something was very wrong.
“The fire started on the passenger side,” Derks said. “I don’t know if it was under the hood or inside the vehicle or where it started — that I can’t even answer.”
“I can tell you that my side had smoke coming out from under the dash. My first response was to get out of the vehicle. I don’t know if opening the door gave it more oxygen or what that did, but when I opened the door was when I saw flames inside the vehicle. I was going to open the hood, but that’s when I saw flames under the dash, and I just walked away with my phone and called 911.”
Derks said he had not taken the van out on the road for close to a year before that Sunday, but was forced to because his other vehicle had been towed earlier that weekend after hitting a deer. He thought the fire’s ignition might have been due to rodents chewing through electrical wiring or building a nest somewhere under his front hood, but admitted those were just guesses.
“I have no clue what happened,” Derks said. “I was in shock — it just shouldn’t have been happening. I was a little bit more concerned for the safety of others, just because a Walmart employee came out with a little bitty canister fire extinguisher and flames were roaring under the hood already. It was like, ‘Thank you for attempting,’ but I know there’s explosive stuff in vehicles, and unless you get to the base of a fire, you’re not going to put it out with a little extinguisher. So while I was on the phone with 911, I was trying to keep people clear. There was a lot of people that wanted to help, but at some point, you’ve got to say, ‘Nope — done.’ It happened so quick.”
Kevin La Page, the Walmart employee who dashed towards Derks’ burning van with the fire extinguisher, said he was concerned for the safety of others as well.
“From my point of view, I was just trying to make sure there wasn’t a kid or a dog trapped in there or something,” La Page said. “I ended up emptying the extinguisher on it anyways, but it didn’t do anything. My guess is the fuel rail probably had a crack in it, because then if it dribbles gas onto that hot exhaust, it probably just lit right up. The car just got engulfed. Thank God it wasn’t parked near anything else. It was all by itself, so it didn’t affect anything else, but it would have probably had a whole row of cars up by the time they got here.”
Finn also suggested the vehicle’s seclusion in the parking lot was fortuitous.
“If it was parked by another vehicle or even a building, there was enough heat and fire coming out of it that it could have easily started that on fire if it was near other things, but luckily it wasn’t,” he said.
Mara Wurtinger, a Pick ‘n Save employee, saw the fire begin while on break in the adjacent parking lot.
“I went out to go on my break and I saw some black smoke coming from the left side of our building and I was like, ‘Something smells like rubber,’” said Wurtinger, adding that she was one of many bystanders who had gathered after taking notice of the fire. “And then when I turned, I kind of walked out a little bit and I just saw this van smoking, and then eventually after that it went into flames. It went from just smoking, and then you heard it go whoosh, and then it kind of went into flames a lot quicker. When I saw it, I was just like, ‘Uh, holy crap.’”
Jeremy Grassman, the mechanic from Marty’s Shell Service who towed Derks’ vehicle Sunday — and the other one which he said was nearly totaled by the deer Saturday — said he has seen other vehicles burned in fires on the sides of roads, but noted that the damage Derks’ vehicle sustained in the Walmart parking lot fire was uniquely destructive.
“We do a lot of tows here, so I see a lot of stuff like that, but never in a parking lot like that, and never anything burned up quite as bad as that,” Grassman said. “That stuff just goes up like that. I used to work at Charlie’s Automotive, and that place burned down when I was working there — everything just goes. But this one was the first one I ever did like that. There was a lot of cleanup — it took me like 45 minutes — and it was all charred, the concrete was coming up. Everything was melted and was all over the ground.”
Derks confirmed this, saying the strength of the heat popped the van’s tires and windows. That he himself was not harmed in the fire, he said, now seems lucky.
“The biggest thing I can say is thank God for insurance,” he said. “Make sure your policy is paid, make sure you have full coverage, because you never know when something like this could happen.”
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