St. Tammany News

St. Tammany Fire District 12 was at its limit Christmas afternoon when two serious fires and two medical calls came in almost simultaneously.

The most serious fire began in the garage of a house located on 76508 Louisiana Highway 25 about one-fourth of a mile from the roadway. The owners were not at the residence, which is their second home. Yesterday, two days after the fire, the fire marshall was called to the scene to examine the still-smoldering debris, even though there was a thunderstorm in the area Wednesday. Ray Newton of FD12 reported, "It may be nothing, but we are still investigating the site." The call originally came in Christmas Day at 3:25 p.m. from an internal fire alarm. The blaze took six hours to extinguish.

"If it wasn't for the alarm system, the fire never would have been reported," FD12 Chief Darrell Guillot speculated. "You couldn't see the house from the road. Those poor people would have come back to their house in a day or two and found it burned to the ground without knowing what happened. That's why it's important to have an alarm system if your house isn't visible to neighbors or passersby."

UniFire, St. Tammany Unified Fire Dispatch, was called upon to help deal with the blaze on La. 25. There were six fire engines, two rescue trucks, four fire chiefs, two tankers, two ambulances and a total of 30 firefighters at the scene. The fire departments of Folsom, Abita Springs, Covington and Mandeville assisted with the call.

In addition to the one-lane gravel drive leading to the house, firefighters also had to deal with a lack of an adequate water supply. They used the fire trucks, and a hose was dropped into a pond nearby that they could access as a water source.

The second call came in as the first fire, a barn on 21873 Rodger Hill Road, was just getting under control. The first fire, called in at 2:59 p.m., destroyed a barn along with the contents - a camper, boat, tools and an upright piano. The blaze was prevented from progressing to the main structure, in part because a 5,000 gallon tanker was used to battle the barn fire.

"Working two fires stretches you," said Guillot. "No one department can handle it alone, and we're fortunate to have UniFire so we can utilize several department at once. Before this system, it would have been impossible to coordinate all that at once."

Many of the departments also had medical calls as well Christmas Day. Lacombe, Abita Springs and FD 12 all had two medical calls. UniFire dispatcher Dominick Bourgeois said this volume of calls is unusual for Christmas Day.