Woodson and Murrayville Fire Departments responded to an early morning call of a vehicle fire on Route 267 over the weekend.
The Morgan County Joint Dispatch Center received a call from a passerby just before 4 am Saturday of a vehicle fire on the side of the road. Woodson Volunteer Fire Department Chief Dave Jansen says the vehicle was fully engulfed when crews arrived.
“We responded to a call just before 4 am on Route 267 and the Winchester Blacktop just south of Woodson Winchester Blacktop. A car had gone off into a ditch and into a field, somehow it got back on the road and was northbound for about five hundred yards south of the Woodson Winchester Blacktop and fully involved when we arrived. There was no person around, no driver, no passengers. I assume it’s still under investigation by the sheriff’s department.”
Jensen says it took approximately 30 minutes to extinguish the vehicle.
“We used foam, Murrayville used foam and we went through about seventeen hundred gallons of water and luckily we had a tanker on the scene. Which we normally do for car accidents and car fires, due to the fact that people don’t always see our lights.
They stare at the lights and don’t realize that there are people out there and they will drive right over us. So we use it to block us. We had actually just refilled our engine with water from the tanker. We had two departments on scene, us and Murrayville. We had three trucks on and they had one.”
LifeStar Ambulance Service and Morgan County Sheriff’s Deputies were also on scene. Bills Towing of Jacksonville towed the vehicle from the scene.