Photo by Larry Sewell – Firefighters quickly extinguished a small fire in the back of a city truck Wednesday morning in front of the old McBrien School.

Quick thinking by a city employee driving a dump truck loaded with debris may have avoided a tragedy late Wednesday morning.

According to East Ridge Fire Chief Mike Williams, Perry Goss, an employee of the Streets Department, was driving a city dump truck down Ringgold Road when he noticed smoke coming from debris that was loaded in the back.

Goss just happened to be in front of the fire department so he pulled in and parked the truck in front of McBrien School. Firefighters ran over and discovered a small fire in the bed of the truck which they quickly extinguished.

No one was hurt during the 11 a.m. incident.

Chief Williams said that a barn or outbuilding on Tanager Circle had been condemned and the rubble from the building was loaded onto the truck headed to Allied Waste for disposal. Chief Williams said someone had built a small “warming fire” at the demolition site on Tuesday night. Embers from that fire were apparently inadvertently scooped up and loaded onto the truck with the combustible debris.

Chief Williams said the increased air flow from traveling down Ringgold Road re-ignited the embers which caught the debris on fire.

“It’s a good thing that it was discovered before that was dumped down at Allied,” Williams said. “When you dump that stuff it looks like dust.”

Another firefighter said that if the debris had been dumped at Allied, it could have ignited a much larger fire that would have required a full-on response.