Owner: Sunday evening industrial fire caused by overheating machine

By Bob Steenson, bsteenson@charlescitypress.com

An industrial fire that called in firefighters from a wide area, prompted a neighborhood evacuation and closed a section of the Avenue of the Saints for a while was caused by a piece of equipment overheating.

Steve Stirling, owner of Hawkeye Preferred Tooling Group located on Old Highway Road southeast of Charles City, said security video in the building recorded the beginning of the fire.

“We have it on camera. One of our plastic machines started to overheat and smoke and started on fire,” he said. “That led to the whole building going.”

Stirling said no one was working in the building when the fire started, at about 8:40 p.m. Sunday, April 6.

He said the building was used for injection molding and blow molding plastic parts, made of polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP).

Stirling said he has 25 employees, and they will be back to work cleaning molds and keeping the mold shop going, but it hasn’t been decided yet what to do regarding the building that was destroyed, whether it will be replaced or not.

He said he wanted to give “a huge thank-you to the area firemen for the quick response and no one got hurt.”

Almost 70 firefighters from Charles City, Floyd, Colwell, Rudd, Rockford, Marble Rock, Nora Springs and Nashua responded to the fire, fighting it until about 11:30 p.m. when the decision was made to let the fire burn itself out because of the lack of availability of water to fight the fire and concern over chemicals released into the air by the burning plastic.

That concern also led to an evacuation alert for residences downwind of the fire, with sheriff’s deputies going door to door and an alert going out to cellphones on the county’s public alert system.

The Avenue of the Saints was reopened Monday morning, and Old Highway Road was reopened early Monday evening.

Although the building was still emitting smoke and small fires could be seen inside Monday, Charles City Fire Chief Sam Deverell said there was no danger to the public away from the scene.