By Jesse Wright
The Clarksdale Press Register
CLARKSDALE, Miss. — Fire broke out at the Clint Williams peanut storage facility Wednesday afternoon that as of 7 a.m. Thursday morning was still flaring up about every 30 minutes as workers worked to move massive amounts of peanuts out of the storage facility.
Fire crews from county departments, as well as the city department, wrestled with the fire throughout the night with the biggest hinderance being that the fire was located inside the warehouse tucked in the middle of the large mounds of peanut harvest.
Clarksdale fire Chief Obert Douglas said the fire likely started because the warm weather heated the peanuts inside of the metal storage shed, and internal temperatures rose to the point where the dusty, tightly packed peanuts to begin smoldering. Such fires are not necessarily rare, and something similar is thought to have caused the lint shack fire in Jonestown last May.
However, Douglas said that such fires can be tricky to put out, because the hottest part of the fire is often buried deep, and extinguishing such fires can take days, or weeks, or longer.
Douglas said that in 1980 he once worked on a fire in Jonestown that took three months to extinguish.
To complicate matters, the county had no readily available source of water at the scene of the fire aside from the water in the reservoir of the fire trucks. Seven trucks, from the county and city, responded to the fire, and at times water from various trucks had to be dumped into a reservoir and sucked up into the tanker trunk. Douglas estimated that the nearest fire plug was 1,000 feet away, across Sunbelt Drive and too far to be reached with hoses.
In addition to the water issues, the storage shed had no readily accessible access point, aside from a small catwalk high above the peanuts and a door near the bottom of the shed that opened into a wall of peanuts that rose about three stories high. After a chainsaw was dismissed, a front end loader was used to smash a hole in the peanuts and rip them out. However, even with the machine, progress was slow, and thousands of peanuts continued to fall, filling in each hole cut away by the front end loader.
Throughout the day, multiple holes were cut with torches at various points around the plant so that more front end loaders and fire personnel could gain access.
It’s likely crews will be trying to remove the crop while fire crews attend to the intermittent flare ups for most of Thursday.
Because the fire is not yet out as of deadline, damages have not yet been assessed. The peanuts are some of the first groundnuts collected from nearby farms, and represent the first year’s investment into local agriculture by the Oklahoma-based peanut company. The Clint Williams purchasing point and storage facility was completed last summer.
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