Morris mayor says officials were unaware battery business was operating in building that’s still on fire. Thousands remain evacuated.

While as many as 5,000 residents of Morris must continue to stay away from approximately 1,000 homes within a 10-block radius of a facility housing lithium batteries after the building caught fire, the mayor Wednesday announced the city has never received a licensing request for the business.

Police and firefighters in Morris, a community nearly 70 miles southwest of downtown Chicago, were called to the 900 block of East Benton Street for a fire at the old Federal Paper Board building about 11:45 a.m. Tuesday.

Mayor Chris Brown on Wednesday said officials were unaware the formerly abandoned building was housing an estimated 100 tons of lithium batteries. Brown said they only found out 10 minutes after firefighters started attacking the blaze with water. They didn’t know the company, Superior Battery, even existed.

“Nobody’s applied. We didn’t even know they existed until yesterday afternoon. There was no way of knowing what was inside. There was never an application made,” Brown said, referencing a business license. “If they were running a business out of there illegally they should’ve come to us to tell us what was inside.”

It wasn’t immediately clear whether Brown was suggesting city officials also didn’t know the building was even in use or occupied, or if he strictly meant the company had failed to follow local rules for obtaining a license. He made the comments during a joint news conference with police and fire representatives at 10 a.m.

At an earlier news conference Tuesday, Fire Chief Tracey Steffes said it quickly became apparent typical firefighting efforts to extinguish the blaze would not work because the warehouse was being used to store lithium batteries, which explode when exposed to water.

“This fire, because of it involving lithium batteries, normal conventional firefighting such as water or firefighting foam will not extinguish this fire, in fact, it will make it more violent and react more violently if we introduce water or firefighting foam,” Tracey Steffes said. “We made the decision to allow this fire to burn its course.”

Crews instead worked to mitigate potential health, safety and environmental hazards by first requesting residents of the surrounding area move away from the potentially toxic plumes of smoke and later issuing a mandatory evacuation through at least 9 p.m. Wednesday.

The evacuation area was bordered by the railroad tracks to the north, Illinois Route 47 to the west, the Illinois River to the south and Washington Street to the east, said Police Chief Alicia Steffes.

She said “because this is a fluid situation,” the evacuation period could be extended beyond Wednesday night.

The fire chief said air quality testing has been done, but the immediate results only affirm whether there are particulates in the air — but the results do not indicate what kind of particulates are found. Those more specific results take at least 18 hours, he said.

Tracey Steffes said residents do not need to call to ask whether they should evacuate or relocate if they live in or are visiting a location where smoke is physically bothering them. He asked residents to use common sense and move if they’re breathing in smoke.

“If your eyes are burning and you can smell it or see it, your body’s telling you it’s something that you shouldn’t be around and you need to move. And I understand it’s an inconvenience and it might be an inconvenience for two or three or four days here — but if you inhale the smoke, the inconvenience and the health effects from it could last for decades or a lifetime, and that’s what we’re trying to avoid,” Tracey Steffes said.

During the Wednesday morning update, Alicia Steffes also urged residents not to tie up 911 with similar questions or requests. There are several law enforcement agencies supporting the 25-officer Morris Police Department so that local officers can respond to typical calls for service. Personnel from other agencies are blocking every possible entrance into the 10-block area and if a resident needs to get back to his or her home to pick up items, such as medication, that were left behind when they were told to evacuate, the resident should approach any of those officers, show an ID with their address and they will be allowed to return home temporarily to retrieve necessary items.

Brown said the city has a nonemergency number, 815-941-3408, people can call to get additional information.

“This is obviously a serious situation and we need the residents as well to take it very seriously,” he said.

A spokesman for the American Red Cross also said a shelter was set up at First Christian Church, 455 W. Southmor Road. Residents can also go to the Grundy County Administration building, 1320 Union St.

Alicia Steffes said the police department is posting updates to the department’s Facebook page but she urged people not to believe everything they read in the comments there, as “rumors” were running rampant, posted by people who consider themselves “Facebook arson investigators,” she joked.

“Trust your local and your known news agencies for news. Don’t go by what people are commenting. When people don’t know what’s going on, they make it up. So please stick with your trusted news sources for what is happening,” she said.

Tracey Steffes said the next step may be to use “dry materials,” such as road salt, to help extinguish the flames because of its low moisture level. Rain showers Tuesday night only made a bad situation worse, he said, and underscored the danger of introducing water to the combustible batteries.

He reminded residents they “might not see a lot of firefighting activity going on at the scene,” a fact that has been difficult for him and his crews to accept.

“It’s hard for a firefighter or a fire chief to stand outside a building and watch it burn, it’s not in our nature, it’s not what we’ve been trained to do,” he said.

He noted concern that the area could become an ongoing environmental hazard, the length or severity of which is still unknown.

“Our end result is safety. To extinguish this fire with no loss of life and no injuries. And when you tell people to stay out of the smoke and stay out of the area, we’re not doing that to just inconvenience you, we’re doing that because it’s a safety issue, a health and safety issue,” Tracey Steffes said.

The evacuation comes two weeks after an explosion and massive fire at a chemical plant near Rockton, an Illinois community along the Wisconsin border, forced the evacuation of hundreds of homes for several days as the fire burned. Nobody at the plant or the surrounding community was injured by the June 13 fire that officials later determined was started accidentally during maintenance work.

Check back for updates.

The Chicago Tribune’s Navya Gupta contributed.