Source of mysterious Highway 64 grass fire under investigation

ELTON — A grass fire that nearly started a building on fire last Saturday, May 18 was likely sparked by debris from an untended burning barrel at a property on Highway 64 near Stegall Rd., according to firefighters and a forest ranger familiar with the incident.

Assistant fire chief Mike Holbrook and captain Brandon Helmer of the Wolf River Volunteer Fire Department both said the house on the property looked like a vacation home, so who started the fire in the burning barrel — and whether it started by wind blowing smoldering refuse outside of the barrel or by some other means — is unclear.

Richard Lietz, Peshtigo Area Forestry Leader, said his department is in contact with the property owners about the situation, and confirmed that these details about the fire’s origin remain unclear.

“The fire is under investigation at this point still,” Lietz said. “We believe it was caused by debris burning, but we were unable to firm up some of the details still. At this point in time we don’t know 100 percent.”

Holbrook, who lives near the property, drove to the fire on his own to gauge its nature prior to any of his crew members arriving with trucks or equipment. He saw it was nearing a garage and took hurried steps to save the building

“There were a couple lawn mowers right there and I grabbed the lawn mowers and I kind of tossed them out in the middle of the driveway,” Holbrook said. “One was actually caught in the fire. I was cleaning anything I could around the building as I was doing my size-up and going around. If the lawn mower would have been fully engulfed right next to the building, it would have caught the building on fire.”

Holbrook said the fire had reached the base of the garage and he was trying to smother it with a piece of plywood when the remaining Wolf River firefighters arrived.

“As I’m going around and doing my size-up on the back side of it is where I saw a lot of big flames coming up,” Holbrook said. “When I went down there is when I grabbed a piece of plywood and was trying to knock that fire down. I wasn’t necessarily trying to put the fire out, I was just trying to keep it under control until help arrived so we could extinguish it.”

Helmer said Holbrook was relaying information about the fire to them over the radio as he worked.

“He was saying, ‘There’s a structure and the fire’s carrying pretty slow but still pretty close to a structure.’ He basically made it sound like we better get our butts in gear,” Helmer said.

Though the fire only took the crew roughly five minutes to completely douse, Holbrook said its progress was unusual.

“The dead grass was underneath the tall green grass and it was moving underneath the tall green grass and popping out in different places and catching other things on fire,” he said. “It only burnt maybe a quarter of an acre but with all the structures and buildings and everything else that they had there, it was a challenge for us to be able to get that fire out before it caught anything else on fire. It ended up spreading almost all the way around the building. I’ve never seen a fire behave like that before.”