It took five days to douse the fire at a northern Iowa business that recycles cardboard and paper. The fire at the Mason City Recycling Center started last Friday and fire crews were still dealing with flare ups Wednesday night.

Mason City Fire Chief Eric Bullinger says it was a difficult fire to fight because of bitterly cold temperatures and because the property is outside of the city limits, in a rural area.

“When you’re exposed to that element of the extreme cold, everything freezes up,” he said, “so you can imagine when you have the water out in the open, that is freezing everything up externally, too.”

Bullinger, in a briefing to the Mason City Council, explained that all of the water to fight the fire had to be hauled to the site because there were no fire hydrants nearby.

“We need to draft or basically vacuum the water out of those drop tanks, but we have to have several departments assist us in this because we’re simply not set up to have that many tankers supply the water to us,” Bullinger said. “Some of those tankers involved would hold 2500-3000 gallons of water at a time and, even with a constant supply…we were using the water faster than we could bring it in.”

Mason City’s fire department got assistance from the fire departments in Clear Lake, Nora Springs, Rockwell and Ventura. “There were 19 fire fighting apparatus (there),” Bullinger said. “Personnel, probably closer to 35 or 40 altogether.”

The city administrator in Mason City said it was “an absolutely miserable environment” in which to battle a blaze of that size and it took the work of all those fire departments as well as city and county officials and private entites near the plant to keep the fire from spreading.

(By  A.J. Taylor, KIOW, Forest City)

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