Two fires hit area business in 12 hours

The state fire marshal is being asked to investigate a fire Butler County Firefighters battled Tuesday night and a second time Wednesday morning at the former location of Insta Pawn, east of Poplar Bluff on Highway NN.

County firefighters spent a total of seven and a half hours during two different times Tuesday and Wednesday battling a blaze at the former business owned by Curtis Phelps, firefighters said.

A county firefighter explained, “at 9:01 last night, we responded to what was Insta Pawn. When we got there, we had a small fire in the attic caused by an electrical short.”

The county had 15 firemen working at the scene last night.

“We were there for two hours,” the firefighter said. “Most of that was waiting on the electric company to come and shut the power off. The power was still hot in the attic.”

Butler County Fire Chief Bob Fredwell explained, “Last night, it didn’t burn a very big spot at all. It didn’t do a whole lot of damage and the owner said he didn’t leave until 11:30 p.m. and everything was all right. He had someone go by at 1:30 and check it. It was still okay.”

“It was definitely going good at 8 o’clock this morning,” Fredwell said, when county crews were called a second time.

Upon arrival, there was “smoke coming out of the roof area of the business from one end to the other,” a firefighter said.

“We were there for 5 hours and 25 minutes,” the firefighter said. “We pumped 25,000 gallons of water. We had 14 firemen and five trucks there.”

Fredwell said the building had a metal roof and plywood ceiling and the fire again was in the attic.

“We went inside, trying to attack and then the ceiling started coming down so we had to back out,” Fredwell said. “We more or less had to do a defensive attack on it.”

The metal roof prevented the firefighters from getting the water to the fire, said Fredwell, adding “you could pump 100,000 gallons of water on it and it wouldn’t make any difference. We tried; we did our best. We’re wore out. Now we’ve got to clean up.”