Firefighters Work Day-Long South Brunswick Warehouse Fire

South Brunswick firefighters, assisted by extensive mutual aid from throughout Middlesex County as well as from fourothercounties, worked fornearly 24 hours to fully extinguish a stubborn blaze in a production warehouse where soap, shampoo and otherpersonal cleaning products were manufactured and stored. It was 1544 on May 17, 2023, when South Brunswick fire companies were dispatched to Progress Road. Monmouth Junction Fire Chief Scott Smith arrived to find heavy black smoke and flames showing from the solarpanels on the roof and extending to the interiorto several areas of rack storage. Asecond alarm was transmitted as first-due crews initiated an interiorattack. Heavy fire conditions in the interiorforced firefighters to back out and transition to exterior operations. Athird alarm was struck and five aerial masterstreams were put in service. After the bulk of the exteriorfire was knocked down, interioroperations resumed. It was found that fire damage, togetherwith waterfrom the masterstreams and the building’s sprinklersystem, had caused much of the storage to collapse, creating large piles of merchandise that continued to burn. Additional mutual aid came from almost every town in Middlesex County and task forces from Somerset, Mercer, Monmouth and Ocean counties. Working in rotations of about two hours each, firefighters dug by hand and used heavy equipment to break apart the piles to reach and extinguish the deep-seated pockets of fire. The blaze was finally declared out around 1430 on May 18. It was estimated that about 50 pieces of apparatus and over200 firefighters worked at the scene.

- Fire News photos by Michael Ratcliffe