By Logan Wells, News Director | Logan@kymnradio.net
On Thursday night at approximately 5:30 p.m., the Northfield Area Fire and Rescue Services were dispatched for a house fire in the 500 block of Vermillion Place in the Bridgewater Heights neighborhood of Dundas. Upon arriving on the scene, police officers confirmed that no occupants were in the house. Dundas and Northfield Police Officers began evacuating nearby houses as a precaution.
Officers closed County Road 1 and Highland Parkway to provide space for the fire department to work. During the incident, Northfield Area Fire requested mutual aid assistance from Lonsdale Fire and Faribault Fire. The fire was in a townhome and could have spread beyond the one home, into 7 other homes, however, the firewalls prevented the spread, here’s Fire Chief Tom Nelson:
“The worry sometimes with townhomes, and we’ve had it happen in Northfield where the fires inside the townhome or apartment and then it gets outside and laps up the side of the building and gets in the attic and goes across. That wasn’t the case in here. The way the roof lines were so that…
No, and that’s it. Did not spread and that’s what’s great about the residential building code in Minnesota is there are firewalls between all units like that and they only last a certain amount of time. But at the end of it, the fire was completely contained to that one unit.” – Northfield Area Fire Chief Tom Nelson, in an interview with KYMN News
Chief Nelson reminded everyone that storing certain items like propane inside can be a large danger to anyone responding to the scene:
“Don’t store propane in anything. Any garden shed any garage, whether it’s attached or not, because those are, you know, missiles.” – Northfield Area Fire Chief Tom Nelson, in an interview with KYMN News
A GoFundMe page has been established for the family who lived in the home. We will include the link to the page on our website in today’s news.
