It was a start to the day no one wanted in Watseka. When people living in an apartment downtown woke up to smoke filling their rooms.
“It was difficult all around,” Nick Peters, deputy fire chief, said.
The Watseka Fire Department got the call around 5:30 in the morning. They got on scene and started trying to contain the flames, but they said it spread to the attic and the 100-year-old building wasn’t built for fire crews working side by side.
“Very few ways that we could get in and really attack this fire and get our crews in there to work,” he said.
There were several other things working against them, like the heat and the size of their crew. That’s why 17 other departments. From Kankakee to Hoopeston, showed up to help.