A fire at a marina in Grapevine on Sunday afternoon injured one person and damaged multiple boats.
Mark Austin, a boat owner who was in the area at the time of the incident, described hearing a big boom.
“I was like, ‘holy cats! And you saw a boat engulfed in flames!” he said, per CBS News Texas.
Grady Hendrickson, who works at the marina, told CBS News that he heard a “loud explosion … like one of the dumpsters that we have getting set down by the garbage truck.”
Ten units from the Grapevine Fire Department responded to the call just before 1:30 p.m. at the Silver Lake Marina on Grapevine Lake. In addition, fire departments from Bedford, Colleyville, DFW Airport, Euless, Flower Mound, Hurst, Lewisville, and North Richland Hills responded to help battle the flames.
Water supply to fight the fire was a significant challenge, as the closest full-size water pump was nearly half a mile away. Crews had to lay nearly 2,000 feet of hose to carry the water to the blaze.
“It becomes manpower intensive because our companies have had to physically lay out the hose from the engine that’s pumping the fire all the way down to the docks all the way to the fire,” Chief Darrell Brown of the Grapevine Fire Department told CBS News.
Temperatures in the mid-90s added to the stress on the fire crews, so the assistance from surrounding fire departments allowed crews to rotate, Brown said.
The fire, which produced a large plume of black smoke, was extinguished after about four hours. Several roads in the area were closed for a time due to the heavy smoke.
One person was injured with a broken leg and possible head injury, police told NBC 5 DFW, but they did not identify the person by name. However, CBS News reported that the injured individual was removed from the boat where the fire started.
“The bottom line is this is still very sketchy and this may change, but we believe somebody went to start their boat, there was either an electrical short or some kind of malfunction and there was an ignition of a fire and that’s what started this whole thing,” Brown said, per CBS News.
City of Grapevine spokesperson Mona Quintanilla said that four boats at the marina had significant damage and six others had minor to moderate damage.
