Firefighters put out late night coal fire at North Antelope Rochelle Mine

GILLETTE (WNE) — Campbell County firefighters and North Antelope Rochelle Mine employees kept a coal fire from spreading across a storage barn filled with coal late Tuesday night, limiting the damage to within the 170,000-square-foot building and a relatively small amount of coal lost.

Tuesday night, a storage barn that houses up to 60,000 tons of coal caught fire, said Kate Eischeid, battalion chief for the Campbell County Fire Department, and only affected a small portion of what the building held.

“It was just a huge structure that holds coal before it’s shipped out,” she said of the barn. “And it was full at the time.”

Coal burns quickly and Eischeid said the challenging part about Tuesday’s fire came from not being able to separate the lit coal from the tons of other coal. Typically, coal that’s on fire can be loaded out or moved in a silo. The barn didn’t have those same capabilities.

“We couldn’t pull the rest of the coal away from the burning coal,” Eischeid said.

Eischeid said the fire was first reported at about 11:20 p.m. and the 11 firefighters, one fire chief and NARM employees had the fire under control about five hours later, about 4:15 a.m.

Because of the quick call, local response and mine employees' help, Eischeid said the damage to the building and coal loss was limited.

“We were able to contain it to one end of the building,” she said. “(Mine employees) caught it pretty early and so to get together with them, (the fire) really made pretty minimal damage to the building and the coal.”

The cause of the fire is unclear, but Eischeid said coal fires can sometimes begin by something as simple as a hot piece of coal or spontaneous combustion.

This story was published on May 29, 2024.