Easily the biggest story Mike McMahon ever covered in all his years at the Record-Herald was the fire in Warsaw, in the middle of what had to be the worst blizzard of the decade.
After everything was over with, the Fire Marshal seemed satisfied the fire was caused by a bad motor in a garage door opener in one of the product storage sheds, but no one knew that at the time and there was at least some cause to suspect arson.
Under most conditions, the Warsaw Fire Department would have been able to handle the storage shed fire by themselves. Since they were an isolated small town, a lot of mutual aid couldn’t be expected, so they had a larger and more capable fire department than most. But, these weren’t most conditions. The storm was bad enough – it was blowing like mad when the fire started, a lot of snow had been dumped, plugging the roads and streets, and lots more was to come.
What made it ten times worse was the night before the fire, a truck driver had managed to skid off the road on the only bridge to the west in town. It was an old Pratt Truss bridge, due for replacement, and the truck was considerably over the load limit, anyway. When the truck went through the side of the bridge truss, the bridge went down with him. He didn’t survive the accident.
When the fire broke out the next morning, the bridge being out meant there was no hope of quick mutual aid from fire departments to the west. The only other way into town from that direction was over a hundred miles of logging roads that had been plugged for the winter, and there wasn’t much help close to the east. The Spearfish Lake Fire Department started out up the logging trail anyway, aided by a couple of big county road plows and a front loader to tackle drifts even the plows couldn’t handle, but it was slow going.
Salvation came from an unexpected quarter. The one other way that Warsaw could be reached from the west was up the railroad. As it turned out, Bud Ellsberg and his brakeman, John Penny, with their one really good railroad engine and a big ex-Rock Island railroad snowplow were already out on the line. By a stroke of inspiration, they were able to call back the Spearfish Lake Fire Department from their nearly hopeless journey and load everything the department owned on flatcars to get them to the stricken town. Going without sleep for the next three days, Bud and John managed to haul in a dozen more fire departments, evacuate the town of non-combatants in school buses loaded onto the flatcars, and bring in desperately-needed supplies and manpower.
In the Record-Herald office, things were frantic. Both George Webb and Mike McMahon could see there was a heck of a story breaking out up there. Mike was trolling around for someone with a snowmobile who could maybe risk the run to Warsaw with him when the relief train began to get talked about over the scanner. Mike raced home to get the warmest clothes he had, while George and Kirsten loaded every film cassette they could find in the office. When the first relief train left, Mike snuck into the caboose along with a crew from the Spearfish Lake Hospital, carrying a backpack with two still cameras, the family video camera, all the film and 8mm videotape he could find.
A lot happened over the next three days in Warsaw, enough that Mike eventually wrote a book about it, and it was published by the Spearfish Lake Historical Society. In the snow and the continuing high winds, things just kept getting worse. Not long after Mike arrived in town the main paper plant caught on fire, the only real industry in town. A desperate firefight with inadequate fire departments and inadequate water ensued. While the firemen were desperately trying to save the plant, pulpwood storage yards to the north of the plant caught fire, as well, and the fire spread from there into houses near the plant.
To make a good book length story short, the firemen fought it out clear back to Main Street, losing all the way, before the wind finally switched around enough to take the fire toward an area where there was nothing but snow to burn. Mike was right in the middle of most of it.
By the middle of the third night, the fire was burning down Main Street. Mike was running out of film, and had long since run out of videotape. There was still a story to cover and pictures to take, but there was only one source of film left. Pictor’s Drugstore was burning pretty good, but Mike had been in there once or twice, and knew the film and videotape was in a cabinet toward the front. When firemen broke down the door to get a hose inside, he raced in behind them, holding his breath in the smoke, and grabbed every roll he could find. Afterward, he always considered that had been one of the dumber things he’d done as a reporter.
Mike used the Pictor film to shoot photos much of the rest of the day, as the firemen finally got on top of the fire. While he’d mostly brought black and white film from the Record-Herald, the film that he’d saved from the fire – well, stolen – was mostly color film, and the few color photos of the fire that existed, he took with it.
While a lot of things went wrong those days, one of the few things that went right was that by a miracle, the phones kept working – Mike would not find out for years, well after his book was in print, that the miracle’s name was Mark Gravengood – but in the afternoon he got in touch with George, who told him to get back to Spearfish Lake on the next train.
Mike got back to Spearfish Lake to discover George, Kirsten, Carrie and Warner had covered another part of the story, one that made it much bigger. There had been two other relief trains, other than the one Bud Ellsberg had been running. One had come up from Camden on the C&SL, with adventures of their own; the other had come in from the D&O through Walsenberg, having had to use a stretch of abandoned, washed-out and grown-up track to get there. Webb had learned Ellsberg was getting set to send a train to Camden for more supplies, and Mike returned to find the staff pulling together the only special extra issue the Record-Herald ever ran. Tired as he was, Mike wrote all night, mostly directly on the Compugraphic, while Kirsten ran negatives and Webb printed them and made halftones.
When the train left in the early morning, with all the available railroad engines to break through the heavy drifts, Mike and the flats for the Record-Herald had been riding in the cab of the second engine. Mike had been able to have a partial press run printed and loaded back aboard the train before it left Camden carrying a boxcar load of foam making chemistry.
That special issue was an instant collector’s item, and while Mike had waited on the printer, he’d sold some photos to the Camden Press and some videotape to one of the Camden TV stations – the one that hadn’t sent a reporter to the fire. The guy the other TV station sent was scooped by three days, and the last Mike heard, was reading hog futures on some 200-watt radio station. A clip from Mike’s video made the national news, and his photos made the Associated Press. Eventually the story won three state awards, and was nominated for a Pulitzer.
Mike had been pleased in an abstract sense, but he had still been bothered by looting Pictor’s to get more film, so when the checks came in, he’d just signed them over to the Warsaw relief fund, and hoped he’d never have a story like it to cover again.