Firefighters contain soybean fire at Gavilon Grain

Monday, February 25, 2019
A mountain of soybeans in front of them, firefighters work to contain a fire at Gavilon Grain in Roachdale on Sunday.
Courtesy Roachdale Fire Department

ROACHDALE — Area firefighters kept a bad situation from getting a whole lot worse Sunday morning at a local grain elevator.

Five area fire departments responded to a soybean fire at Gavilon Grain, 3237 E. SR 236, Roachdale.

The original call for the Roachdale Fire Department went out at 8:26 a.m.

Gavilon workers told the department officials that a relatively small area of wet beans inside the large structure had been smoldering for about a week, with employees doing their best to contain it.

When they arrived to work on the problem Sunday morning, flames were showing, so the fire department was called.

Roachdale Fire Chief Mike Poole said that considering the structure in question is big enough to house three million bushels of soybeans, a box alarm was called in, with four more area fire departments — Bainbridge, Russellville, Greencastle and North Salem — as well as PMH ambulance arriving on the scene.

Due to the size of the building, Greencastle brought its aerial truck, though it was not needed.

“Everybody did exactly what they needed to do and kept it to a smaller incident than it could have been,” Poole said.

Working closely with the Gavilon employees and using only 500 gallons of water, firefighters were able to knock down the flames and contain the damage to a small area.

“That helped a lot to have the Gavilon workers there. We worked together and made it a smaller issue than it might have been,” Poole said. “It worked out exactly the way we would have drawn it up.”

With the fire out, Gavilon workers were left with the task of cleaning out the affected area.

Firefighters remained on the scene for about four hours.

However, that wasn’t the only action of the day for the department. Poole reported that various issues caused by high winds in the area in addition to the fire kept responders out for much of the day.

“We started at 5 a.m. and I don’t think I made it home until 3 or 4 p.m. was when it finally slowed down,” Poole said.

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