Adam Prudhomme
Editor
A small fire at Napanee’s Goodyear plant produced a lot of smoke but fortunately no injuries and not much damage.
Members of Greater Napanee Emergency Services arrived on the scene around 8 p.m. Tuesday night and quickly discovered the fire was contained to the building’s HVAC unit.
“The fire ended up being in the HVAC system so that’s why we had so much smoke in the plant,” said GNES acting fire chief John Koenig. “It’s just part of the heating system and the HVAC system that does the ventilation so it just pumped the smoke all through the building.”
Fire crews arrived on scene prepared for a large battle but were relieved to discover the smoke made it look a lot worse than it was.
“That was the concern when we show up and especially at the one end of the plant it’s three stories tall and the whole end is full of smoke, all three floors so you think you got something big burning and then it turns out in the end it wasn’t once we found it,” said Koenig.
The plant is also well suited for fires.
“Once the smoke alarms went off on the other end it just automatically shut off the doors so there was no smoke in the production end of the plant,” said Koenig. “They actually continued on making tires.”
The building’s layout also made it easy to clear the smoke once the unit was all clear.
“It was very minor in nature and the smoke was quick to clear because they have some large overhead doors in that building so it wasn’t long before the smoke was cleared out,” said Koenig.
Though the call turned out to be minor, it still serves as a reminder to all homeowners and businesses as the cold weather approaches. The chief reminds everyone to check their heating unit as they fire them up after a long layoff over the summer. That’s not just limited to furnaces either.
“Anybody that is using wood stoves or pellet stoves they should inspect them and clean them because we’ve had pellet stove fires over the years because people didn’t maintain them,” said Koenig. “There’s quite a few of those around, a lot of people like to burn those wood pellets. It’s a good thing to make sure they’re all in good working condition before using them.”