Firefighters needed so much water to battle a huge grain elevator blaze that they had to ask the whole town to go without — even canceling school to conserve the water supply, officials said.
The cause of the fire isn’t yet known; a fire marshal began an investigation. It took firefighters responding from 17 communities about eight hours to extinguish the blaze in the town of about 2,200 people, which was reported about 11 p.m. Sunday, said Hawley City Administrator Lonnie Neuner. No injuries were reported.
Firefighters even used water from the local golf course because the town’s water tower couldn’t keep up, Neuner said. Their ladder hoses each use about 600 gallons a minute, about as much as Hawley’s system can pump, Neuner said. He expected the city would allow water usage to resume “pretty soon.”
Firefighters even used water from the local golf course because the town’s water tower couldn’t keep up
Unless it’s just much harder to utilize, I feel like the golf course should have been tapped first. No one needs golf.
Nah. Let the kids go without school first, then the people without showers. Then, if we have to, I guess we could give up golf.
/s if it wasn’t obvious.
I feel like a chopper with a bucket attachment would have been better than sending in trucks.
Letting it burn down would be best, it’s going to be torn down and destroyed anyway if it was that hard to put out.
Edit: not sure I empathize with those downvoting me, I dont see a world where a private business’s asset, which is covered by insurance, is worth the health and safety of an entire community for any length of time.
Sorry Helen, we can’t run your dialasys machine because it would inconvenience Mr. Landowner. Sorry Martha, I know you’ve just been in a lab accident and your skin is melting off, but we need the emergency shower water for Mr. Businessman so that he thinks we’re doing work instead of caring about our community.
Agreed. Just dig a trench around it instead of making an entire town go without water.
That far out, the golf course was probably on an independent grey-water system and not the main grid. Probably had tankers pulling it straight from the wells and driving it to the site of the fire.
The question NONE of the school kids asked: How does cancelling school save water?
It’s a rural town, so maybe a lot of the kids live in the country and are on wells instead of the town’s water tower?
You’re probably right.
You don’t want a lot of people on a confined area with no water. I don’t think it’s about saving water as much as making sure there aren’t 100s of kids in a building with no water.
It would be cool if someone could invent a fire hose that spewed out sand instead of water.
Were there any golf courses, industrial factories, computer server farms, etc. that were using water at an alarming rate in this area solely to support a small number of people’s individual profit in this town?