Tim Franz was putting ceramic tile down on his kitchen floor when he got the call. He was six months into his job as Oshkosh fire chief, and a boxcar loaded with over 140,000 pounds of sodium hydrosulfite had caught fire. Soon he was helping to facilitate the evacuation of a large swatch of Oshkosh south of 20th Avenue,an area which included his own home. It was the middle of December, and the department was working to get families back into their homes, a process that took around five days. “(My tile project) ended up getting ruined because it just sat. I was in the middle of it and the mortar and everything else was all set up by the time I got home,” he said.