Blaze halts I-15 traffic

Keith Paul

Friday, Dec. 10, 1999 | 10:17 a.m.

A truckload of cardboard caught fire on southbound Interstate 15 Thursday, intermittently slowing or stopping traffic for hours as firefighters put out the blaze and workers cleared away the aftermath.

A woman pulled her car alongside a flat-bed tractor-trailer loaded with 40,000 pounds of recycled cardboard, honked her horn and pointed to the rear of the truck. The truck driver looked back and saw the load of cardboard burning, Las Vegas Fire Department spokesman Tim Szymanski said.

The driver pulled the truck over to the side of the highway near the Charleston Boulevard interchange about 1 p.m.

The burning cardboard started falling over the side of an overpass and down an embankment along Wall Street and Martin Luther King Boulevard. A breeze also sent burning embers toward a nearby neighborhood, Szymanski said.

"Many of those houses had wood-shingled roofs that could easily ignite if (the burning embers) landed on them," he said.

Firefighters went into the neighborhood to make sure none of the houses caught fire, and none did.

Fire officials could only speculate on what caused the load of cardboard to catch fire. It could have been a discarded cigarette or a spark, the said.

Whatever the reason, the cardboard was hard to put out because it was packed so tightly. Firefighters poured water onto the cardboard and pulled it over the embankment to help extinguish the load. The firefighters brought the cardboard-fueled blaze under control in about 30 minutes, officials said.

A bulldozer was used to move the tightly packed cardboard to allow firefighters to get water into the still smoldering pile. The use of the bulldozer caused all the lanes of southbound I-15 to be closed for a short time.

The driver said he picked up the load of stacked cardboard from a Losee Road plant and was driving it to Ontario, Calif. His truck suffered slight damage, but the load of cardboard was destroyed. Damage was estimated at about $10,000, fire officials said.

Las Vegas Valley traffic was further snarled Thursday afternoon when an accident clogged traffic on southbound U.S. 95 near the Tropicana Avenue exit.

At about 2:30 p.m. a Highway Rentals crew had parked their truck on the side of the southbound travel lanes of U.S. 95 and were cleaning some graffiti off a roadside sign, when a Silver Dollar Recycling tractor-trailer heading south hit the truck.

The accident, which is still under investigation, closed southbound traffic to one lane for several hours, Nevada Highway Patrol Trooper Scott Flabi said.

The driver of the tractor-trailer was taken to University Medical Center to be treated for non-life threatening injuries.