The Dickinson Fire Department works at a fire in downtown Dickinson on Tuesday night
Cigarettes started the fire that displaced the tenants of four apartments Tuesday night in a downtown Dickinson building.
The fire originated from a plastic cigarette disposal container, Dickinson Fire Chief Bob Sivak said. The container, sitting a second-floor deck area on the north side of the Jessen Building on the corner of Villard Street and First Avenue West, somehow ignited and started a fire because of multiple combustible materials nearby.
“We’re listing the cause of the fire as unintentional and related to smoking materials,” Sivak said.
Sivak said two apartments and the building’s roof were badly damaged by the fire, as was electrical wiring to the building.
A couple embraces while looking at the remains of their rented trailer home early Saturday morning in south Dickinson. The couple lost two pets and most of their possessions in the fire, which happened directly behind the Paragon on Villard Street. (Dustin Monke / The Dickinson Press)
A young Dickinson couple is homeless after a late Friday night fire consumed the trailer home they were renting, as well as their two pets and most of their possessions.
“Absolutely everything they had, they lost right here,” Dickinson Fire Chief Bob Sivak said at the scene around 1:15 a.m. Saturday.
The couple, whose names were not provided, lost their Chihuahua dog and a cat in the fire. They were only able to salvage a handful of items left unaffected by the fire.
The trailer was only about 25 feet behind the Paragon bowling alley and sports club off Villard Street. The building was evacuated for a short time until the Dickinson Fire Department contained the blaze.
Sivak said the fire likely started in the front of the trailer, but that it’s difficult to determine the cause.
“There’s nothing to investigate. That’s how bad it is,” he said. “Wires are burned right down to the copper. The walls are down and everything. We could make a guess, but I don’t want to do that because I can’t prove that one way or another.”
Sivak said the couple did not have renter’s insurance, but that the American Red Cross was at the scene and was looking into ways to help them.
Anjana Gohil, center, is comforted by her daughter, Omega Gohil, and Rev. Tim Privratsky, chaplain of the Dickinson Fire Department, on Friday morning after the apartment above hers caught fire and displaced them after four years of living in their apartment off Sims Street in Dickinson.
Jesse Samsa broke down in tears as he watched firefighters inspect the apartment building he had lived in for the past three months.
As he looked at his section of the white building at 1143 Sims, now black and charred beyond repair, the Pennsylvania native living and working in Dickinson could only muster up three words.
Burned prairie is all that surrounds this flagpole after a U.S. Forest Service prescribed burn went wrong, scorching more than 14,000 acres since Wednesday. The rubble was once Castle Butte Country School House. It burnt down in the blaze. (Submitted Photo)
Ranchers south of Hettinger and Lemmon, S.D., are wondering what they’re supposed to do for grazing lands after what was intended to be a prescribed burn in the Grand River National Grasslands got out of control.
The fire scorched more than 14,000 acres of federal and private land over 22 square miles Wednesday and Thursday in Perkins County in northwest South Dakota.
The U.S. Forest Service said it was intending to burn 130 acres of dead crested wheatgrass when the fire broke containment areas and spread throughout the national grasslands and privately owned lands because of dry and windy conditions.
Dustin Monke 