The Grand Junction Fire and Rescue Department put in some overtime this week with three fires in the area.

Fire Chief Mark Renslow says last Friday, they assisted the Jefferson Fire Department with a house fire on South Oak Street.  This week, they were the lead department on a house fire on Tuesday at 508 South 11th Street in Grand Junction and dealt with a hoop livestock building fire on Wednesday at 2209 230th Street.

He points out that Tuesday’s fire had several challenges.  They were able to avoid injuries from the sub-zero temperatures when the fire started early in the morning before the sun was up and the roof of the two-story home had multiple layers of wooden and asphalt shingles to get through.

Wednesday’s fire also provided extra obstacles.  Not only dealing with the high winds blowing smoke everywhere, Renslow adds another problem that they had to overcome.

“Well another thing was that we had our hose dirty and it was drying from the day before so we were kind of short on hoses so that’s why you call in multiple departments on that kind of thing too.”

He states that having all your equipment working properly is also helpful when you get called out to a fire and he says they were fortunate to respond to Wednesday’s fire due to partially frozen valves from Tuesday’s fire.

“Actually the mechanic was in there working on the truck when we got paged out for this fire and he just got it fixed to where we could use it so we were able to use it yesterday or we really would have been in trouble.”

Renslow says in total, his department worked over ten hours in those three fires.