Hull, Iowa — Three fire calls in two days. That’s what the Hull Fire Department was treated to this week.
According to Hull Fire Chief Ron Hoksbergen, on Wednesday, they responded to the call of a vehicle on fire near a shop. He says it was in the 3500 mile of 260th Street, just into Lyon County, about six miles northeast of Hull. He says while they did find the older car fully engulfed in flame, it was far enough from the shop that it wasn’t in danger. He says firefighters extinguished the flames and were back on their way in about a half hour.
Then on Thursday afternoon at about 3:30 p.m., they were paged to 300th Street and Ironwood Avenue, about three and a third miles northeast of Hull for a field fire with standing crop. He tells us there was a lot of smoke when they arrived and the strong winds made firefighting difficult. He says the best thing they did was to ask dispatch to put out a Nixle message asking for farmers with disks to disk firebreaks. He says they were able to put out the main fire pretty quickly and the farmers helped them with the rest. He says the cause is undetermined but the farmer was hauling manure with an umbilical line and he wonders if something happened to the manure pump. Hoksbergen tells us a few acres of standing crop did burn but the rest was just stubble. Firefighters from Boyden also helped. He tells us they were back in service within about two hours.
But before they were done there, they were called to a skid loader fire at 3574 340th Street, about three and a third miles southeast of town. That call went out a few minutes after 5:00 p.m. Hoksbergen says the workers were loading round bales in the field when they saw smoke. He says luckily they had the presence of mind to drive the skid loader to the rock-covered driveway so that it wasn’t in danger of burning the field. He says it must have been a malfunction of some kind in the engine or perhaps cobustibles near the exhaust that started the fire. The skid loader was totaled in the blaze. Firefighters were on the scene there for about 30 minutes.
