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Lampasas Street Dept. Superintendent Carlos Garcia uses a front-end loader to clear snow and ice in front of Lampasas Fire Department. LFD saw a huge increase in call volume early this week. Garcia also serves in the Lometa Volunteer Fire Department, where the city’s water supply was strained during the extreme weather. JEFF LOWE | DISPATCH RECORD
Since the start of last week, Lampasas Fire Department responded to several residential structure fires: two resulted in total losses, one was contained to a kitchen, and three others were extinguished in the chimney.
LFD received 16 calls for service on Tuesday, including a generator fire, a chimney fire, medical assists, smoke alarms going off, a vehicle wreck and a water leak in a senior living facility.
One of the several chimney fires occurred Wednesday night on County Road 4016, not far from Lampasas High School and was contained relatively quickly to the chimney area.
Very early Thursday morning, a structure on CR 4804 near Kempner was ravaged by flames.
On Monday, after low temperatures plunged to single digits, more than 20 firefighters from Kempner, Copperas Cove and Lampasas converged to battle a blaze on CR 4756. That fire resulted in the total loss of a single-story brick home.
Lometa VFD has had a limited water supply this week. At the Lampasas Fire Station, a generator has supplied power during rolling outages.
Paid and volunteer staff have spent extra shifts at the station, sometimes bringing the total manpower to 2 to 3 times what it normally would be to help handle emergency calls.
Kempner VFD Deputy Chief Justin Martin summarized Monday’s fire on CR 4756, which was reported late morning.
Occupants were out of the home when the first firefighting units arrived on the scene. No one was injured or suffered cold-weather-related health emergencies, although extreme temperatures seriously impaired equipment and response times.