By Bonnie Adams, Managing Editor
Aidan Callaghan with his sisters, Molly ( r ) and Meghan
Photo/submitted
Northborough – An observant little boy is being credited, in part, with notifying authorities of a brush fire April 14 that spread over nearly seven acres before being contained.
Aidan Callaghan, an 8-year-old second-grader at the Lincoln Street School was on the bus home when he noticed smoke coming from a wetlands area on Crawford Street. As soon as he got off, he ran into his house and told his mother, Jennifer.
“I grabbed the kids (Aidan and his sisters Molly and Meghan) and we jumped into the van to go check it out. We had our phone ready to call 911,” she recalled. “When we got there we noticed that a tree had knocked down a live wire. So we called and within a few minutes the trucks were there.”
That live wire, at 13,800 volts, according to Fire Chief David Durgin, was indeed the cause of the fire. High winds that day, he said, had knocked the wire onto a tree, subsequently igniting the brush.
“It was extremely small when we got there,” he noted, “but because the wire was live we had to wait for National Grid. And of course, it being a very windy day, they were very busy so we had to wait a bit. So we tried to contain it the best we could until they could get there.”
An additional problem, he said, was that part of the land was “extremely swampy.”
“Some of our guys were up to their knees in it,” he said.
Because the fire spread so quickly, mutual aid was called in from Berlin, Boylston, Shrewsbury, Southborough and Westborough. A team from Marlborough helped cover the Northborough station. Crews also assisted from the state’s Department of Conservation and Recreation Forest Fire Unit and a forestry strike team, with firefighters from Framingham, Ashland, Sherborn and Sudbury, was also called in.
Adding to the afternoon’s workload was an additional fire caused when a truck nearby went up in flames. The truck, Durgin said, was driven by a civilian who came to watch the brush fire. Unfortunately he got stuck in the mud. The friction from his spinning tires caused sparks, igniting the truck, which was subsequently badly damaged.
“It could have been a lot worse – it had the potential to burn 100 acres,” Durgin noted of the main blaze. “Luckily it did not reach any neighborhoods.”
“We have great mutual aid and we are lucky we have good neighbors,” he added.
Durgin noted that several calls came in to the station alerting of the fire, so he was not sure who had made the initial call. But he was pleased, he added, to hear that young Aidan had “done the right thing.”
“We always encourage people to call 911 and we thank them and commend them for their cooperation,” he said. “It’s also great to hear kids are paying attention when we talk to them so they in turn know what to do.”
Aidan, for his part, was in “awe,” his mother said, of the firefighters’ efforts.
“He watched them work until 7 p.m. that night,” she said. “He was very concerned about them.”
“My kids know these are the real heroes in our lives,