A house fire south of Manilla early this (Thursday) morning, caused damage to an attic but there no injuries. The Manilla Fire Department was called to 1635 2400^th Street around 3:45am for the fire. Corey Gaskill, captain for the Department, said the smoke was coming from the attic inside the attached garage “Then we found the attic access out in the garage and once we opened the door from the house to the garage, the garage was full of smoke. Then we notified the rest of the guys coming and as soon as they got there, we got up in the attic and realized we had some embers and flames near the wood stove. We made access in the roof which was dangerous because of the snow and ice on the roof. It made it really hard to cut a hole.”

He said the roof joists were what was burning and the damage was isolated to the one area,

 “It was a well executed fire. Everybody did really well. We basically kept it to the wood stove area. When we were inside after the fire was out, the wall was ripped out all the way around the stove to make sure we didn’t miss any hot spots. But really that’s all the damage we had in there.” Gaskill said the frigid temperatures made things difficult for the firefighters “Our knobs were frozen shut. We had some air packs that we had issues with because they were froze. We had a lot of tanks changing out and a lot of air packs being flipped around.”

Fire Departments from Defiance and Irwin were called to assist about 15 minutes within battling the blaze. They were on scene for about 2 hours while the Manilla Fire Department was there until 6:30 this morning. Gaskill said the family was staying with a neighbor. The wood burning stove was the likely cause of the fire but was not confirmed by the department. A dollar amount of damage was not given. 

(Joel McCall/KNOD)