New Year’s fire

Ladder truck helps extinguish Stratford house blaze

Chad Willemssen, Stratford Area Fire Department (SAFD) assistant chief, just happened to be driving into the village of Stratford on Sunday when he received an emergency call shortly after 6 p.m. for a house fire at 213330 Legacy Street.

At that moment he saw four- to five-foot tall flames coming through the roof of the rental home, which is located across the street and to the west of Stratford Elementary School.

SAFD’s fire call automatically also paged the Edgar, Hewitt, McMillan and Spencer fire departments to respond. The renter was not home at the time of the fire but police were able to evacuate people out of their homes on each side of the house on fire.

Willemssen was pleased firefighters were able to prevent the fire from spreading to neighboring homes that are located very close to the house that was on fire. He is thankful for the McMillan Fire Department being able to situate its ladder truck in the backyard of the neighboring property to the north of the house on fire.

“We were lucky to have the ladder truck because it was too unsafe to put firefighters on the second floor and roof of the house on fire,” he said. “We had firefighters spraying water from east to west inside the house and the ladder truck spraying water from west to east so we could cover the entire house. We train with the McMillan Fire Department so any of our firefighters can also use its ladder truck.”

Willmessen said Scott Dennee, village of Stratford director of public works, told him firefighters used from 40,000 to 45,000 gallons of water to extinguish the house fire. SAFD was on the fire scene for 3-1/2 hours.

Many village of Stratford residents watched from a safe distance while firefighters worked to extinguish the fire. Willemssen said the cause of the fire is unknown but the fire did start on the second floor of the home. The rental house is a total loss in the fire. A tow truck needed to haul the ladder truck out of the neighbor’s backyard.

“The ladder truck axles went down into the ground so cordwood needed to be placed underneath them so the tow truck could pull it out,” Willemssen said.

He contacted a rural Mosinee resident who represents the company that owns the rental house in Stratford. He also told the neighbor to the north of the house on fire that this spring SAFD would take care of the large ruts in the backyard caused by the ladder truck.

Another fire two days later

Stratford Area Fire Department (SAFD) was paged to a fire at 7:38 a.m. on Tuesday at Ivan Borntreger’s workshop at 122219 Big Rapids Road in the town of Cleveland.

Tim Carey, SAFD chief, said the fire started in the southeast corner of the building. He said the cause of the fire is unknown because the Amish do not use electricity.

“We had to take the tin off the inside and outside of the building to get the fire out,” Carey said.

He said there was heavy insulation inside the building which kept the fire from spreading but made it difficult for firefighters to find hot spots in the steel building’s walls.

SAFD received automatic aid from the Edgar, Hewitt and McMillan fire departments. SAFD also received Mutual Aid Box Alarm System (MABAS) from the Athens, Marathon, Mosinee and Central Fire departments.

Carey said the Edgar Fire Department filled its tankers with water from the town of Wien hall to help SAFD extinguish the fire. He estimated only 6,000 to 8,000 gallons of water was used to fight the fire. SAFD left the scene at noon.