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Firefighters quell barn blaze near Lake Manassas
Brown smoke seeped up into the cloud-speckled sky Monday afternoon, disturbing an otherwise picturesque Virginia day in western Prince William County.
Residents as far out as the Manassas Regional Airport could spot the sepia silhouette hovering above Lake Manassas as flames engulfed a barn on the east side of Glenkirk Road near the City of Manassas Water Treatment Plant.
Commuters heading westbound on Vint Hill Road could see balls of orange flames off in the distance around noon as they stopped near a bend in the road due to road construction.
“It was pretty much gone when we got here,” Fire Capt. Steve Barr said of the barn.
Firefighters from the Gainesville District, Nokesville and Stonewall Jackson departments responded first to the scene and had the major flames quelled in less than 20 minutes.
The hoses were drained, rolled up and brought back to the trucks around 1:30 p.m. while the charred remains of the two-story structure laid covered in white foam and black ash. No people or livestock were hurt.
“This wasn’t that bad,” said Barr, a 23-year firefighting veteran, who noted that the lack of hay inside the barn made the fire relatively easy to put out.
Mother Nature worked in the first-responders’ favor.
Even without rain, surrounding green grass was moist enough to keep the flames from spreading toward the gas tanks outside the Water Treatment Plant.
Wind blew either south or east for most of the fire fight. That led the smoke away the facility and the 12-foot-long access point cut in the fence to the north.
“There was no endangerment to the water treatment facility,” said Battalion Chief Lance McClintock, who supervised the 15 crew members on duty.
According to Barr, the barn burned easily because of the aged wooden frame, which he estimated to be about 50 to 60 years old.
“[The] wood’s all dried out,” he said.
No one in the blue fire marshal jackets on scene confirmed the cause of the blaze, nor did the battalion chief.
Just before 12:30 p.m., two firefighters poked the southern-most frame of the fence with a pole, bringing a quarter of the burned-out barn plummeting to the ground.
“Now, the outside one too,” Tech 1 firefighter Steve Melville said to colleague Donald Everson later on as the latter guided water over small flames throughout the barn while the former held up a section of the hose.
“There you go,” Melville soon added.
“Heads up!” he shouted to Everson and Nick Felanciano about an hour into the fire fight as a chunk of the frame along the middle section collapsed.
With wind blowing into their faces at 1:11 p.m., Felanciano and Everson sprayed foam on the barn from the south side. Their heads then cocked to the left while directing the foam onto an adjacent tree, the hose coming in about elbow height on their left sides.
A rusted metal roof lay on the ground to the east of the barn by the end of the mission. Liquid dripped to the ground behind the brick foundation at the bottom of the barn.
As for the odor, that was to be expected.
“[The barn will] smolder for days,” reckoned Barr.
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