A fire Thursday damaged a factory in southwest Iowa. Creston Fire Chief Todd Jackson was among the first to arrive at the Bunn-O-Matic plant. He says the fire got started in some stackable cardboard and styrofoam in a storage area. There were also some employees who still hadn’t evacuated when the firefighters arrived.
Some were still trying to put the fire out themselves when the crews arrived, and they evacuated everyone and then put the fire out. Chief Jackson says when he confirmed there was a fire and calculated how big it might be, he used the region’s “structured request system” to ask for more help.
Initially, he called for a third alarm, which brought in the rest of his local firefirefighting crew and also some from Orient and Afton. When he arrived to find a working fire inside the storage area, he declared a fourth alarm, which brought in a ladder truck and a pumper from Osceola, and crews from Corning and Mount Ayr.
As they were putting the finishing touches on the job, the chief said it looks like the damage will be mostly from smoke, not fire. The Creston plant makes brand-name coffee machines. “I doubt if we’ll call in the fire marshal,” Chief Jackson says. “We should be able to determine a cause.” The investigation hadn’t started last night, and he explained the scene would be cleared out before that begins.