MN Firefighters Battle Historic Structure Fire for Seven Hours

Crews from at least a dozen Minnesota fire departments worked for hours to put out a large blaze that collapsed the roof of a historic structure Tuesday.

The fire broke out at about 10:30 a.m. at the Moose Event Center in Hibbing, KQDS-TV reports. Within a half hour of firefighters arriving at the scene, the flames brought down the structure's roof.

“We made a tactical decision to go defensive early on in the fire," Hibbing Fire Chief Erik Jankila told KQDS. "It wasn’t worth risking somebody’s life to put them into a building that’s partially collapsed."

Hibbing crews, as well as crews from Virginia, Grand Rapids and other communities, shattered windows to send streams of water onto the flames. Nearby buildings were quickly evacuated as, and those structures sustained some damage in the blaze. 

“In the 25 years that I’ve been here, we’ve only had a few handful of major downtown fires, so it’s something that we prepare for, something that we train for, but it’s not something that we see on a regular basis,” Jankila told KQDS.

Firefighters needed seven hours to eventually extinguish the blaze. No injuries were reported in the incident.

“When you have a building of this magnitude and the roof structure that you have and you have the amount of debris that has collapsed on top of stuff that’s burning, it’s gonna smolder for a long time,” Jankila told KQDS.

“If it weren’t for the men and women that took the time out of the day to respond to our time of need we probably would not have been able to contain the fire to the building of origin,” he added.