Fifteen Geary County rural firefighters on five trucks responded to a grassy and wooded area just northwest of Junction City near the Bayer Construction asphalt plant on Monday afternoon.

According to Rural Fire Chief Garry Berges there were no injuries and the asphalt plant wasn’t damaged. Some grass in the area burned, and a separate out building and converted semi-trailer that was also being used as a building were consumed by the grass fire. The owner of those two facilities is unknown at this point.

There was a lot of smoke from the fire. “Those two buildings made a lot of the smoke that people were seeing. We did have some grass and trees, this area probably hadn’t been burned in probably many years, so that contributed it. Nice thing was we had a gravel road, the asphalt plant and then the ( Republican ) river which helped protect two sides of it. Again….no damage to the asphalt plant.

Berges confirmed the cause of the fire is undetermined at this point. “Assistant Fire Chief Curt Janke will be doing an investigation now that we got the fire out. We had a live power line that we had to render disabled by the electric company ( DS&O Electric ) before we could come in and do much.”