Mt Morris School Fire

[pcfdcap1]

Fire consumes the elementary school in Mt Morris
http://www.wtvo.com/Global/story.asp?S=1642514

[jboczek]

Truss roof on a building that big and I'd stay out of it, too. Anybody know how old the school was?

[Weruj1]

Cap, were you on the job ? I got no idea how far away that is from ya......

[MIKEYLIKESIT]

Pearl City isnt located too terribly far from Mt. Morris. I bet PCFD was one of the responding departments. I saw the footage on the news. Boy it was a blessing no one was killed or injured.

[pcfdcap1]

When Mt Morris struck their 4th alarm, we along with Lena moved a tanker and Lanark an engine up to Shannon Fire in Shannon's new station. We are just far enough away that we didn't get any closer. Half of the Carroll county tankers did respond though. Oh yes, I'm jealous of Shannon's new station too.

[jboczek]

Mike, I know how you feel about the new station, except we'd sometimes call MA just to get a new TRUCK in our station. Ours were so old that they looked out of place in our new addition. We fixed that problem, though.
That's about as close to a school fire as I'd want to get. We've got a couple BIGGGGG Catholic churches in our district. If one of them ever goes, I'm going to be out of town. Neither town has enough water to put them out and the next closest decent supply would be at least 6 miles away. We don't get into big water shuttles down here for some reason. I know that's something we need to work on, but nobody else seems too interested.

[ChiefReason]

Of course, I am always curious about origin and cause. Sounds like it started at the roof level accidentally. I looked, but no one seemed to want to elaborate on it. So we have a fire that was fought with 45 pieces and over 150 firefighters. Sounds like an excellent effort was made.
Truss roofs are a killer. It's always nice to hear someone who recognizes light weight construction and makes good decisions as a result.
I always liked mutual aid. Lets you see who the "others live"!
CR

[Weruj1]

another good thing about mutual aid ................not so much pickin up to do usually ! ....Art you were about 4 hours away from a phone call to check on ya ............you been ok ?

[80FIRE]

Mt Morris made the national news this morning. They showed some video of the fire and interviewed a school administrator and students. From the video the fire was intense and lots of nice rigs on the scene. The school may be a total loss but at least no FF or students were hurt.

[lilyogi]

I was sitting in my office cutting vinyl decals when I heard the call. I was not able to hear most of the radio traffic since I live a distance from Mt. Morris, but I kept hearing the MABAS alarms going out and requests for tankers. I am curious how well the MABAS alarms worked for them. From what I could hear it sounded like it went fine. Like anything else I am sure they found some things that need tweeked. Just glad to hear that no firefighters or students and staff were injured.
Lil yogi

[pcfdcap1]

Communication is always the first thing to take a dump on a major disaster. The was only one real communication problem that I could hear. Some of the responding trucks didn't have the IFREN(MABAS)frequency in their radios and that turned out to be a minor problem. I was really impressed with the Ogle County dispatcher who ran the call. She remained calm and was very professional.

[FireDiver111]

We are 45 miles from Mt. Morris......sent a tanker.

Rumor has it that a maintenance man was thawing out frozen pipes.....which started the fire.

One of the articles I read stated that the fire was discovered when a ceiling tile fell in one of the classrooms.........ON FIRE!!!!!

[jboczek]

Jaybird told me that even with the communications down, everything went well. We're just getting into this MABAS thing down here so I've been picking his mind. This is about the first big one I've heard about since Division 47 formed. I can not remember ever hearing of a tanker coming from 45 miles away down here. I think we would traditionally just do without water. There's that "T" word. I'm getting lots of ideas here the last week or so. Need to start on those box cards.