Pesky attic fire keeps firemen busy at Cowley residence

A stubborn attic fire in Cowley occupied members of the Lovell Volunteer Fire Department for most of Monday morning.
Assistant Chief Bob Mangus said a call came in at 8:08 a.m. about smoke in an attic at 60 East 3rd North, the Glenn and Coleen Scheeler residence, in Cowley.
Responding firemen climbed a ladder and looked into the attic and found to the east side of the area a strip of blown-in insulation about 10 feet long that was smoldering.
“So we knew we had a wire that had shorted out and caught the insulation on fire,” Mangus said.
He said a fireman was able to enter the attic without an air pack due to the small space and start pulling out insulation in buckets, handing it down to firemen in the room below. A second fireman joined in the effort.
“They eventually got it down to where we found a wire, and we found four trusses that had burned where the wire was lying on them,” Mangus said. “There were multiple burn points due to a heavy load on the wire. We took up a few buckets of water and lightly wetted down the trusses and the remaining insulation.
“It looked good. The smoke cleared up, and we thought we had it. We told them to get a hold of an electrician, because Rocky Mountain Power would energize the house until it was fixed.”
Firemen cleared the scene at 9:26 a.m.
Then came round two.
A second call from the location came in at 10:24 a.m., with an electrician working on the wiring reporting that smoke had again filled the attic. Firemen responded and found smoke coming out of the opposite side of the room to the west near a breaker panel – nowhere near the original problem.
This time, with the roof tapering down at the west location, firemen had no room to access the attic.
“The smoke was getting heavy, though there wasn’t a visible fire,” Mangus said, adding that firemen used an infrared heat camera that could follow the hot wire from the room below across the ceiling. He said the wire had shorted out from the breaker panel halfway through the house, adding, “That usually happens when a circuit is overloaded.”
Firemen covered the floor and a bed with a tarp, then started cutting out the ceiling, dropping the ceiling material into tubs that were taken outside and emptied.
“We removed the whole ceiling in the bedroom to the breaker panel,” Mangus said. “We didn’t even use water. We just handed it outside. We found melted wires catching the insulation on fire. It was all due to friction caused by the overloaded wires.
“There was probably 10 to 25 feet of wire and insulation on fire. I don’t know why it started or the kind of load they had. But it was pretty cold that morning.”
Mangus said, in building a home, it is best to staple wiring above insulation so wires don’t come in contact with insulation at all.
Firemen cleared the scene for a second time at 11:39 a.m.