A small volunteer fire department managed to knock down a truck fire that caused a “river of fire” across a busy B.C. highway and stopped the blaze from turning into a wildfire.
Deputy fire chief Wayne Jasper with the Anarchist Mountain fire department said crews received a call around 4:30 p.m., Monday, to the vehicle fire on Highway 3 on Anarchist Mountain near Osoyoos, B.C.
“We had a fully involved pick-up truck that was sitting on the side of the road. The occupants had been able to get out of the truck and were standing quite a ways away,” he told Global News.
Eighteen firefighters responded to the scene as the fire quickly spread to nearby sagebrush on the side of the highway.
The Osoyoos Fire Department was also on scene, providing a water tender for assistance.
Jasper said the pick-up truck’s plastic fuel tank had ruptured.
“We had diesel running all across the highway that caught fire so we had basically a flaming river running across the highway at the time,” he said.
The four occupants of the vehicle managed to escape.
Jasper said the pick-up truck is so severely damaged, that the fire department can’t conduct an investigation into the cause.
The highway was closed in both directions. It took crews almost an hour to extinguish the inferno, which was visible from all of Osoyoos.
Jasper said luckily the weather was working in their favour and the blaze did not turn into an out-of-control wildfire before it was extinguished.
“Had the winds been blowing the other direction,” he said, “it could have set the fire down the hill.”
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