by Dennis Dalman
Huls Bros. Trucking will continue its business despite a catastrophic fire that suddenly erupted on March 12 and destroyed eight of the company’s trucks and the building that housed them.
“We’ll keep going,” said the company’s operations manager, Rick Winter, during an interview March 23 with the Newsleaders. “We’re working on it. We’ll clean all of it up once the snow is gone. We lost eight of our 30 trucks.”
The fiery catastrophe happened shortly after 4 p.m. Tuesday, March 12.
The disaster, Winter said, happened because one of the semi-trucks in the building caught fire and then the fire spread very rapidly. An employee at the time ran to get a fire extinguisher, but when he approached the building, thick smoke prevented him from re-entering. The fire had rapidly spread to the other seven trucks.
Huls Bros. Trucking has been in business for 30 years. It is located about four miles west of St. Joseph in St. Wendel Township at 13266 Collegeville Road. Its truckers haul heavy loads mainly in the five-state area.
Winter was driving home, just a mile from his house in St. Wendel, when he received a call from someone saying “There’s a problem, there’s smoke coming out the back of the shop.”
Stunned by the news, Winter immediately turned around and drove back.
“It was just crazy,” he recalled. “What a mess. It sucks, but at least nobody was hurt. I want to thank all the fire departments and everybody else who helped that day.”
Responding to the emergency call were the Stearns County Sheriff’s Department and firefighters from St. Joseph, St. Stephen, St. John’s University, Albany, Avon, Cold Spring and Rockville. St. Joseph police, St. Joseph Life Safety personnel, Minnesota Department of Natural Resources workers and a Mayo Ambulance crew were also at the scene.
This is a bird’s-eye view of Huls Bros Trucking taken long before the March 12 fire that destroyed one of these shed-buildings and the eight semi-trucks parked within in.
