Truck Fire – 10/19/2017
Not every camping trip hands you a story worth retelling years later — but our October 2017 trip up north sure did. What began as a quiet night in the woods turned into a 3:00 a.m. wake-up call I’ll never forget: a semi truck fully engulfed in flames just a few campsites away. Here’s how the night unfolded, along with the photos I managed to grab in the dark and the next morning.
We were camping in Saxton, WI. I was woken up by some very loud noises around 3:00a.m. at first I didn’t think much of it, as we were not far from highway 2, which often has trucks, which are a bit loud. After some additional noises, I decided I better get up and check it out. I was shocked to see a large fire, just several campsites over. It was reaching at least 15 feet high.
After taking a second to wake up, I decided we should all get in the car and move farther back and call for help. We got into the car and move back a good 100 feet. I called 911, as at this point it wasn’t totally clear if the driver was out of the truck or might be in danger.
Firetrucks started showing up within maybe 20 minutes of when we called and got the fire under control. The truck ended up being filled with lumber, which appeared to have caught fire to some extent. They spent the next couple hours off-loading the lumber to another truck, log-by-log and spraying down each log.
The next day, we took a look at the truck as we left, the back end of it was totally destroyed.
Looking back at these photos still gives me a jolt. In the dark you can see the flames towering up through the trees, bright enough to light the whole campground, and then the red glow of the fire trucks once they finally rolled in off the highway. It wasn’t until daylight that the full damage really sank in — the back end of the rig was a charred skeleton, the tires burned clean down to puddles of melted rubber and bare steel rims, with scorch marks streaked across the pavement where it had all happened.
The good news is that, as far as we know, nobody was hurt. And the crews who turned out in the middle of the night to wrestle a burning load of lumber under control deserve a lot of credit. Out here in rural northern Wisconsin, plenty of those firefighters are volunteers, pulled out of bed by a pager the same way we’d just been pulled out of our tents. If there’s a lesson in any of it, it’s a simple one: when something looks dangerous, don’t stand around taking it in — put some distance between you and it first, then call for help. We did, and it turned into one heck of a camping memory.
