Fire damages Portage County business as firefighters battle to save structures
Portage County firefighters once again had to band together to fight a major fire Thursday night.
Only a handful of firefighters remained on scene Friday morning as a state fire marshal's office investigator looked through the still smoldering rubble that had been the heart of a trucking supply firm on Route 5 in Charlestown Township.
Like the fire at a former mill in downtown Kent just a week ago, a call for mutual aid was put out as several Portage County fire departments worked through the night to contain the fire that spread to an adjacent structure on the property.
Capt. Wayne Scott of the Charlestown Township Fire Department said at least 11 area fire departments provided mutual aid to the township's volunteers at Linings Inc., also known as Patrick Excavating & Trucking.
"We needed their tankers. We needed a lot of tankers here because there's no hydrants," he said.
He said firefighters set up 3,000 gallon portable "dump tanks" to serve as water reservoirs to supply engines pouring water on the fire.
Tanker trucks from the other fire departments were sent in relays to two locations to fill up and shuttle water back to the scene: West Branch Reservoir, where water was pumped out of the lake, and the Portage County Engineer's facility on Newton Falls Road.
The engineer's office site was shut down after a water line broke and a new fill location was opened at a hydrant just west of the Route 44/Route 5 interchange on East Main Street on the Ravenna/Ravenna Township line.
Route 5 in Charlestown was closed for hours while firefighters were on scene. The fire was eventually brought under control around 2:30 a.m., Scott said.
There were no reported injuries and a cause had not been identified as of Friday morning.
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Ravenna Fire Chief Mark Chapple said his department got the call at 8:20 p.m.
"Our engine actually was the first engine on scene, because we're a full-time department and Charleston was responding from home; they're all volunteer," he said. "The first report was that there were visible flames and the fire was already going through the roof of the structure.
"They started putting water on the fire and also started trying to save the other buildings attached to the structure ... They were trying to keep the fire from spreading through the roof line to the other structures attached to that building. It becomes a battle of BTUs versus GPM, that's heat versus gallons per minute."
At one point, a water line broke on Newton Falls Road near the county engineer's office filling station.
"When we were filling the tankers up there we happened to notice just down the street from us the water was coming up from out of the ground, about 15 feet into the air," Scott said. Firefighters then moved the filling operation to the East Main Street location.
Chapple said there were two other water main breaks, one of which had not been located as of Friday morning.
A company representative on scene Friday morning declined to comment.
According to the company's website, the firm was founded in 1991 by Tim Patrick as a heavy-duty truck parts supplier, T.P. Truck Parts. His business in dump truck liners grew and resulted in a name change to Linings Inc. Two expansions were completed, one in 1998 and another in 2013. The company employs at least 11 people in its shop, according to the website.
According to the Portage County Auditor's Office, the property is valued at just over $800,000, though the 24,000-square-foot warehouse built in 2013 appears to be undamaged.
Scott said the departments that provided mutual aid included Brimfield, Deerfield, Garretsville, Kent Palmyra, Paris, Ravenna, Ravenna Township, Rootstown, Suffield and Windham.
Eric Marotta can be reached at emarotta@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter @MarottaEric.
This article originally appeared on Akron Beacon Journal: Major fire damages Patrick Trucking in Ravenna on Thursday night
