What is the worst rural fire you have responded to?
Mine was a 3500 sq ft L shaped barn and adjacent drive through grain bin with scale loaded with a few thousand bushel of soy beans. Damn beans burned for 5 days and the whole corner of teh county smelled like burnt soy beans for 2 weeks. Been 3 years and the departments Durango still smells like burnt soy beans on a warm summer day. Ruined 14 sets of turnout gear and 600' of hose due to the oil from the beans. Oh, and it was -3 with wind at about 25 mph and sleet/snow/freezing rain throughout the event. Tankers from 11 departments, two of the tankers left on tow trucks before it was over. Went back a couple times a day for several days dumping water on mounds of smoldering soy beans.
mine was where we had gotten called out to a barn out behind a house and we didnt even realize until we had the fire put out that there was ten to fifteen LP gas tanks sitting inside blood red almost to temperature to explode
this is a hard one to answer. we have had two in the last 6 months. The first one was are bowling ally 10 hours and 18 fire dept. and a rekindle before it was completely out. The second one was a week later we where called in as atomatic mutatal aid and 4 of our guys where badly injuried 2 of them are still recovering at home one will be back firefighting with in 3 to 5 months the other will never acually fight fire again probably do fire police or run the radio.
Was part of the tanker shuttle for a chemical plant fire that took something like 40 departments (fire/ems/ambulance) to tackle. The only traffic you saw on the highway was fire trucks flying back and forth for water from the nearby towns. Evacuate at least one entire town and part of another (about six miles away).
have hay/machinery shed fires on a faily regular basis throughout summer months they can be exciting when farmers have forgotten to tell us about oxy accetelene bottles and oil and petrol drums inside the shed. Also get the occasional opencut coal fire as we live close to 3 major power stations. Before my time in the brigade we've had a cotton mill fire and also a paper mill fire. but biggest iv been involved in would be bush fires last year
Our sister department got toned one day for a garage fire. When they got there they found two vehicles, a kerosene heater and about four or five tanks of various "fun" (I think it was mostly oxygen and acetylene). Everyone was surprised the owner didn't blow himself and a chunk of the block up.
We responded to a mutual aid incident and found a barn fully involved. After extinguishing the fire we found the barn was full of sheep. Lots of burnt, dead sheep. I will never forget the sight or smell. As a side note a member of our nieghboring department found out the hard way not to poke a bloated sheep.