Storage site left to burn itself out
Smoke to linger in city for days
SPRINGDALE — Black smoke will continue to billow over Springdale for a couple of days as firefighters allow a warehouse fire to burn itself out.
The fire began Friday afternoon in a 70,000-squarefoot building at 659 E. Randall Wobbe Lane. The building is used to store Styrofoam containers for the Cargill poultry processing plant across the street.
The decision to allow the fire to burn out was made after a firefighter was injured inside the building about 5:30 p.m. Friday, said Capt. Matt Bagley, the Springdale Fire Department public information officer.
“He was working inside with his crew and something up high fell on him,” Bagley said.
The name of the firefighter was not released, and his injuries are not considered life-threatening, Bagley said.
“They took him to the hospital, he was discharged to go back home and he’s going to be following up to have some further procedures done,” Bagley said Saturday. “He is at home resting right now.”
The blaze’s threat to human life and the ground lost during the rescue of the injured firefighter made it necessary to pull any remaining crews from the building Friday, he said.
“There’s some stuff that’s up really high in the warehouse that they couldn’t see to determine where the dangers were,” Bagley said.
Pulling the firefighters out of the building allowed the fire to spread throughout the warehouse, he said.
Firefighters will remain at the scene to monitor the blaze as it continues to burn over the next couple of days, Bagley said.
“We have a crew, sometimes two crews, just monitoring the situation, spraying some water into the smoke if there’s embers in it and just being present,” he said.
Train passage across Randall Wobbe Lane has been intermittently interrupted as firefighters run hoses across the portion of the tracks that cross the roadway, said Andrew Preston, track foreman with Arkansas & Missouri Railroad.
Four trains were delayed, and one scheduled to travel from Springdale to Fort Smith was canceled Friday because of track closures, he said.
Preston said the railroad will resume normal operations as soon as the need to block the tracks is eliminated.
“We’re going to hopefully
be up to 100% tonight,” he said Saturday of train operations.
The Fire Department has been monitoring the air quality to ensure that smoke from the blaze doesn’t threaten area residents, Bagley said.
“We have been monitoring air quality around the scene itself and also in adjacent properties,” he said. “We’ve been out patrolling where it looks like smoke is going, and we’ve got out hazmat meters out there looking for things like carbon monoxide, hydrogen cyanide and a few other things that are the big concerns in the smoke.”
No dangerous levels of toxins had been detected in the air as of Saturday afternoon, Bagley said, but he encouraged residents in the area to spend as little time outside as
possible to prevent respiratory irritation from the smoke.
“People are safe in their homes,” he said.
Kim Bien, a Springdale resident, was at Talon Plaza at 2257 Old Wire Road midday Saturday and said he was experiencing no ill effects from the smoke.
He said he was relieved to be able to breathe easily, despite the plumes of black smoke he could see southwest of the plaza.
Updates on the air quality will be posted on the Springdale Fire Department’s Facebook page in the event there are any changes to conditions, Bagley said.
“If there’s nothing posted on our Facebook page, it basically means that nothing is changing,” he said.