Portland, OR. — Official Release: At just before 7PM, Portland Fire & Rescue responded to a possible grass fire with a caller reporting seeing smoke from a grass field. The location of the field is to the North of the Cintas Warehouse located in the 12300 block of N. Columbia. Engine 22 arrived to a large field (400’x600’ with a distinct slope heading to the west with a few deciduous trees randomly placed throughout) to have fire running nearly the length of the field in light fuels that was beginning to impinge upon the cyclone fencing surrounding the warehouse.
With the large amount of fire, the command officer balanced this vegetation fire to a Wildland Box Assignment to have enough personnel with the correct equipment to address the fire. With the location of this incident, all help is coming from the south and in one case, a rig responded SW Portland with their specialized brush unit used to gain access to fire across soft soils.
There was a light wind out of the north that pushed the fire up against a cyclone fence and ignited a large wooden storage shed on the interior of the warehouse property. Crews diverted from the grass fire to address this structure to prevent this from growing to consume an additional structure or the fleet of Cintas vans in the adjacent parking lot. With heavy fire and the unknown contents of the interior of the shed, the command officer directed a defensive fire operation to use large streams of water to extinguish the fire from the exterior. The wooden roof structure collapsed to reveal 2 large metal con-ex containers that were housed in what was now a burned up wooden shell. Crews kept the fire to the shed structure and prevented the extension of fire to adjacent structures and vehicles.
As the engines were addressing the shed, the brush units and personal ATV’s extinguished the fire in the grass field. Within an hour the crews totaling nearly 30 firefighters had eliminated all the flames present and had ensured the shed was completely extinguished.
Portland Fire Investigations Unit has responded and is performing their forensic investigation to determine cause. It was determined the contents of the large steel storage containers were paper products and metal valves and do not pose an environmental hazard. No reported injuries.
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