The Great Butter Fire

By Mark Hay

Mid-Morning, May 4, 1991 Mount Horeb, Wisconsin

A short message buzzes through Patrick Burns’s pager: Chief Charles "Chuck" Himsel wants a crew to assemble down at the fire station, ASAP. 

It’s Saturday morning. It’s cold and gray outside. And this isn’t some special summons. 

As a young volunteer firefighter — a round-faced, corn-fed 22-year-old kid who's been on the team for just over a year — Patrick knows he doesn’t have to respond. 

But he's a farkle, local firefighter slang for a hardcore fire nerd. The sort of guy who, as he puts it, “buys all the t-shirts, goes to all the conferences, does all the trainings.” Some people use farkle as a mild insult, to rib obnoxious young try-hards. Yet, Patrick wears his nerdhood proudly. He's all about being a firefighter. 

According to his parents, when they took him home from the hospital as a newborn, a fleet of fire engines returning from a brush fire flanked their car in a “coincidental procession.” Five years later, Chuck's father and predecessor, Chief Howard "Howdy" Himsel, recruited Patrick's mother, a registered nurse, to staff their new ambulance service. Patrick spent his childhood as a firehouse brat, exploring the station while his mother trained or went out on calls — and gradually developing a deep fascination with the crew's work, as well as a profound respect for Chief Chuck, a fellow fire nerd. 

Patrick's jazzed to be on the team now, and eager to put his training to use. But he also dreams of taking his nascent career farther. Granted, he's not sure how to do that. There's no clear path to advancement for an ad hoc volunteer, and full-time, paid gigs are rare in these parts. But Chuck teaches fire science at a technical school in Madison, the state capital, and is shockingly well-connected and widely-respected for a small town chief. And Patrick knows that he rewards passion and flexibility with mentorship and opportunities. 

This page came directly from Chuck, rather than from dispatch. 

Patrick never turns down a call from Chuck, if he can help it. He drops what he's doing and heads out. 

Mount Horeb's a blink and you'll miss it town — a mile wide, give or take, and almost entirely cradled within a three-minute-long curve in Highway 18. When Patrick steps outside, he doesn't hear the fire station's whistle, or spot a wisp of smoke curling up over the low and compact skyline. 

But sometimes their small crew doesn't flip on the sirens, so Patrick thinks that this could just be a lo-fi local incident. Mount Horeb's volunteers often get called out to fight fires in even tinier towns nearby as well, or on farms so deep in the boonies that they have to trundle over acres of open field and pasture just to reach the blaze. In fact, Patrick's biggest call thus far was a remote barn fire, where his crew had to deal with 75 obstinate resident cattle. 

So this silence means nothing.  

Patrick moves down main street, past a staggered line of pot-bellied, big-nosed, grinning wooden trolls. The town's aggressively proud of its Nordic heritage. Every year since 1966, the community has come together for a production of The Song of Norway, an operetta about Norwegian composer and national hero Edvard Grieg, with the same craft and enthusiasm other towns pour into Passion Plays. But the trolls are new — part of a plucky campaign to lure folks off of the zippy new highway and on to the quaint local “trollway.” 

Just a block south of the trollway, the fire station — a plain, functional A-frame unit — stands in stark contrast to the carved kitsch at the heart of the town. But stepping inside, Patrick sees not only a small yet robust fleet of well-buffed trucks, but also Chuck's makeshift museum of antique firefighting equipment, town treasures, and toy fire engines. Dozens of them. On cabinets and in counters, tantalizingly out of reach of any firehouse brats.  

Out of 30-some volunteers, a dozen fellow hard chargers file in alongside Patrick and learn Chuck's called them in for something special: There’s a big fire in Madison, about 30 miles east then north by car, he explains, and the city department’s asked for all the help they can get. 

Patrick is amped. 

"Heck yeah," he thinks to himself. "Let's go. Let's do this!"

He’s proud of Mount Horeb — home to a trendsetting chiropractic clinic, once so popular that the doctor had to build a motel next door to accommodate out-of-town patients. It's a Frank Lloyd Wright–inspired structure that retains a bit of its ’60s swank, though it’s clearly seen better days. The town is also home to the world’s leading mustard collector — a former assistant attorney general who will later open a mustard museum and write a book on food law, Habeus Codfish. And, thanks to the Himsel family's dedication, to a uniquely capable rural fire service. 

But Madison runs the region's largest full-time, paid department. They're so well-stocked and well-trained that they never ask for help from small-fry. In fact, Patrick always feels “a little bristle” between the Madison Fire Department (MFD) and rural teams. Small towns hate having to rely on Madison for help when shit hits the fan, and Madison never fully trusts their training. So this must be a truly huge fire. 

Patrick isn’t one to relish in other people’s tragedy, but he wants to stretch his skills and build bridges with the big city pros. Maybe he'll find a way to use those connections someday. So he hops in a truck, no questions asked.

He's so eager, he doesn't even wonder why the city folk want his team to bring a brush truck built for off-roading across difficult terrain, out to those back-of-beyond farms and grass fires. 

As the Mount Horeb crew winds out of the hills of south-central Wisconsin, towards the fringes of the city, they see a plume of thick black smoke, rising well over a hundred feet into the air. It honestly looks a lot like one of those Kuwaiti oil fires Saddam's men lit earlier in the year, as they retreated from their ill-fated Gulf invasion — conflagrations so nasty that military firefighters had apparently started calling the lightning-fast war Operation Desert Hell.  

The pillar of smoke, visible from neighborhoods across Madison. Image courtesy of the Madison Fire Department.

Folks as far afield as Oshkosh will later claim they could see this smoke from the ground, while passengers in airplanes taking off from Green Bay will claim they could see it at altitude. 

And as the team turns off the highway onto Cottage Grove, a four-lane arterial road, they clock almost a football field’s worth of vivid orange-red flames, flickering dozens of feet above the horizon.

But Patrick isn’t focused on the flames. His eyes are fixed on steel beams, twisted up like spaghetti and coated with curled strips of sheet metal, lining the ground. He watches rivers of sludge — thick, viscous, and gritty — coursing down the eastbound lane, pooling at the deep curb, climbing up to the axles of a couple of stranded fire trucks. And then he notices the Madison firefighters: dazed, dripping with boogery globs of ooze, zombie-marching through the muck like the titular hero of The Toxic Avenger.

The snarled, flaming remains Patrick saw on his approach. Photo courtesy of the Madison Fire Department.

Firemen help each other wade through the river of sludge. Photo courtesy of the Madison Fire Department.

A gunked-up fire truck, stranded in the river of sludge. Photo courtesy of the Madison Fire Department.

Faced with such an utterly absurd scene, confusion breaks through Patrick's enthusiasm. "God dang, what a mess," he says to himself. "How did this happen?"

“We’re literally right across the street from a fire station!” 

He wouldn’t realize it until much later, but Patrick had just gung-ho’d his way into the city’s largest, costliest, and by far strangest fire to date. It’s a blaze so bizarre that it is now notorious among fire aficionados across the nation — and an experience that would change the way Patrick and many other responders thought about fires forever after. 

Over the course of eight days, this fire chewed its way through 2.5 million cubic feet of cold storage and almost 30 million pounds of food therein. Including over 13 million pounds of surplus butter, purchased by the federal government as part of a longstanding price stabilization scheme and stashed away until they could figure out what to do with it. As it melted, this burbling lactic slurry blended into millions of gallons of hose and sprinkler water and oozed its way out of the rubble, down a hill and into the streets where it turned into a fast-flowing "butter river." A torrent of goop soup carrying a parade of charred fruitcakes, canned hams, and the occasional cob of corn past a line of slipping and sliding firefighters, and towards the city's beloved lakes. A literal flood of environmental ruin. 

The 'Great Butter Fire,' as it came to be known, melted itself into Wisconsin lore. Despite its notoriety, the full story of the blaze remains unknown to most — yet unforgettable to those who lived it.

2:30 p.m., May 3rd, 1991 Madison, Wisconsin
Central Storage & Warehouse, Madison Facility

Forklift operator Jeff Bruening clocks in for his shift at the Cold Storage & Warehouse (CSW) site on Cottage Grove. 

The company, which works with the government, big firms like Swiss Colony and Ocean Spray, and dozens of local farmers and markets, has had some kind of warehouse on this site since 1964. Back then, the road was still a two-lane ribbon cutting across defunct farms, which local developers were rapidly carving up and transforming into residential neighborhoods. 

But in 1988, the company poured several million dollars into a major renovation. The facility was now made up of five interconnected buildings, each about 60 feet tall and packed with 50-foot metal storage racks. 

Bruening reports to Building 1, a 170-foot-wide and 260-foot-deep freezer at the northeast corner of the complex, with a covered 105-feet-deep loading bay in the rear. Two trucks sit at the dock, waiting for shipments of Oscar Mayer meats. Oscar Mayer stores so many hams and hot dogs in this particular mega fridge that they've installed something called a "Super Chill Monitoring" system. It’s a dedicated phone line that creates a live feed from the warehouse thermostat to Weiner HQ. But it glitches out so often no one pays it much heed. 

That's the problem with all the new tech in the building. Even the alarm system's sent a few false alerts to the fire department over the last couple of years. 

As he clocks in, Bruening’s outgoing counterpart warns him that Forklift 003 is a bit buggy.

Bruening nods. That’s not surprising. 

Like everything else here, 003 is state-of-the-art equipment, computerized to follow radio signals along the warehouse, precisely navigating the narrow aisles, and equipped with extra-tall arms to reach the facility’s highest racks. But its complex mechanics break down all the time. They just had a repair guy in here about a week ago to look at it.

After over two years on the job, Bruening, a blue-collar dude in his late 20s, has developed a system for dealing with the buggy days. 

He gives 003 a quick spin to see if it's feeling less temperamental after a rest. But its hydraulics shut down midway through an aisle on the east end of the warehouse. He shuts off the computer system while leaving the battery and fan on, a reboot that sometimes resolves this issue. This time, it doesn’t. So Bruening notifies his supervisor, who ambles over and tries to restart the lift again. It didn't work for Bruening, but maybe it'll work for him. 

Instead of calming down, 003's fork arms rise up faster than they should. Alarmingly fast. Bruening slams an emergency shutdown control before the machine can damage itself. 

Resigned that there's nothing else they can do, the supervisor puts in a repair order while Bruening hops into an alternate lift. 

A diagram of the Central Storage & Warehouse Facility included in a Madison Fire Department incident report. Drawn from files provided by the Madison Fire Department.

3:20 p.m.

Bruening is on the dock, slapping a label sticker onto a ready-to-load crate, when he hears a whoosh, like a torch being lit, only much louder. He turns towards the wall between the dock and the freezer, and through the plastic curtain doorway sees a circle of bright blue flames rising from a puddle that's pooling below the forklift’s 5,600-odd pound battery units. 

That's new. He has no idea what that liquid is. And the flames are growing around the lift's cab. That's bad. 

That's really bad. 

Bruening bolts back to his supervisor's office, just off the loading dock, and shouts, “the lift blew up!” 

Wordlessly, the two men grab powder fire extinguishers and sprint back to 003. They pass the only other employee on site and tell him to call 911.

Back in the freezer, the two men unload on the flames, which seem to be fading away under the smother. They were prepared. They've got the right gear. They've got this handled. 

But both of their extinguishers rapidly run out of powder and the flames spring back up higher than before, five or six feet off the ground and growing bright yellow. 

Operator and manager retreat, ordering the third employee and the drivers to evacuate and close the bay doors that connect the dock to the parking lot behind them. The wall between the freezer and the loading bay is built to withstand at least two hours of fire. The guys are operating under the belief that this isolation will cut off the fire’s supply of oxygen and overhead sprinklers will drown out the fading flames.

3:30 p.m. 
Madison, Wisconsin
Fire Station #5

Around the same time that third CSW employee dials 911, Gerald Burse, a middle-aged man with a receding hairline but broad shoulders and solid build, stands over a pile of hose lines laid out behind the station kitty-corner across the road from the warehouse. The crew has just finished pressure-testing them to make sure they wouldn’t burst during a fire. Gerald and a couple of his teammates are left to wind them back up.

Firefighters on the Station #5 lawn during the Butter Fire. Photo courtesy of the Madison Fire Department.

While pushing through this monotonous task, Gerald glances towards CSW and clocks a tongue of fire licking out of the roof of Building 1, topped by a 50-foot pillar of smoke.

After that final, failed reboot, 003 apparently decided it really wanted to complete its arm stretch. So it booted itself back up and threw its forks toward the ceiling with such force that the hydraulic hose lines inside ripped, like a 'roided out bodybuilder snapping a tendon. 

Years ago, a mechanic had swapped out its factory-issue hydraulic fluid with a petroleum-based aircraft-grade substitute — great for cold storage, less so for withstanding the heat of a battery as heavy as a rhino and scorching worse than a fresh McDonald's coffee. The flames caught the trickle of fluid running down the arms, ran up to the hose, and presto, instant flamethrowers.

Twin jets of burning hydraulic oil blasted through the air, roasting hot dogs and cheese wheels across the racks like a Terminator 2: Judgement Day take on a BBQ. The fire likely caught some of the highest racks, just shy of the warehouse's sprinkler pipes, which kicked on with as much force as they could muster. Unfortunately, the best they could do was a nervous trickle when compared to the flames. 

The warehouse's roof is really just a thin layer of sheet metal, topped with eight inches of flammable insulating foam, protected from the elements by tar and gravel. Once the flames warped the flimsy sheathing, they slithered into the ceiling, gobbling up foam and creating a shaft of oxygen to feed the fire, now climbing back down the racks. 

The fire seemingly crept sideways through the foam as well, down into the exterior walls, which are likewise just a sheath of tin around insulation. On the south side of CSW, employees at the neighboring Fish Building Supply, a massive lumber yard, see a layer of wall, maybe 20 by 20 feet, bow out, tear with a sound like ripping paper, and barf out a stream of fluffy white foam. But they shrug and go about their days. Whatever's going on — maybe an HVAC malfunction? — they're sure the firefighters across the street have a good read on the situation. 

In reality, Gerald is, to put it mildly, a little shocked to see a sudden burst of flame right across the street.

Although there are a few industrial parks on Cottage Grove, the thoroughfare is flanked north and south by Elvehjem and Rolling Meadows, residential neighborhoods studded with little parks and anchored around public schools. Built like suburbs within the city limits, the streets are closed loops and culs-de-sac, studded with low-slung ranch homes and bungalows with wide, green lawns. The sort of neighborhoods where you'll always find free-roaming kids, having latchkey fun on the streets. Sure, there's a house fire every now and then. But these neighborhoods are notoriously quiet. So, Station 5 spends most of its time dealing with paramedic calls. 

Still, Gerald's a trained pro. Firefighters don't gawk or balk. They see and act. He drops the hose he's working on, runs into the station, and yells, “CSW’s on fire!” 

Officer-in-charge Terry Rice, a broad-faced man in his early 40s with a thick mop of hair and mustache, heavy brows, and an unexpectedly pointed chin, isn't sure how to react. 

He wasn't supposed to be here today. 

Originally a chemist, he'd spent his 20s working as a lab technician before realizing that, unless he got a PhD, he'd never earn enough to support a family. One of his colleagues was planning to jump ship and become a firefighter. Terry's father was on the force, and he knew they made a solid wage with sterling benefits, so he followed suit, joining the MFD in 1980. But while he found the work rewarding, he still had his eyes on the big bucks. He currently runs a side hustle, dispatching off-duty firefighters to clean windows. 

He's supposed to be on a four-day break, immersed in squeegees and softball. But Station 5 was short an officer, and a 24-hour shift of overtime is about $600 in his pocket. He's usually stationed on the west side of town, by the university, where he deals with a slew of prank alarm pulls and rowdy sports fans. So he was pretty sure this was going to be a pretty quiet, profitable day of casual supervision. 

While Terry's just uncertain, most of the crew is outright incredulous that something's really going on over at CSW.

They're all wary of the industrial buildings nearby, conducting inspections at least once a year to keep tabs on potential hazards and make sure their sprinklers, extinguishers, and other fire protection equipment all work. But the ticking time bomb is Royster's, a fertilizer plant built back in the '40s, which has spilled its fair share of volatile chemicals over the years. CSW is a giant refrigerator, full of metal, meat, and cheese. Sure, fight fires long enough and you'll learn that everything can catch aflame under the right circumstances. But that stuff doesn't go up easily. 

"I consider butter a friendly item," a firefighter who fought this blaze tells me. "I put it on my toast. It's not one of those things that scares me."

But no one thinks about all the cardboard and wooden boxes or the plastic shrink wrap, stacked high and tight like Boy Scout kindling towers. 

This has to be a bad joke. Yeah, just when our hoses are all out of whack. What are the chances? Har har. 

Gerald's adamant, though. And Terry knows him a bit better than the rest of the crew. He trusts this man. 

So Terry decides to call dispatch, see if anyone's called in a fire. As the crew waits on the line…

3:33 p.m. 

The station's alarm goes off.

A wave of recognition spreads: Oh shit, this is real. Terry, Gerald, and a few other guys rush back outside, throw a pile of wound lines back on their rigs, and radio into HQ to offer their own assessment of the size of the blaze as they hop across Cottage Grove.

3:35 p.m.
Central Storage & Warehouse, Madison Facility

Terry hops off the rig as the supervisor, who's been standing by, opens one of the loading bay doors for him. It's smokey in there, but Terry can see the plastic curtains sucking back into the freezer — a telltale sign of a healthy fire gulping down oxygen. Through the haze, he can just make out a pile of rubble down an aisle, wreathed in yellow flame. But that’s too low to pierce the ceiling. There’s also some sort of beam collapsed in front of the aisle. And he hears the rip and wobble of sheet metal warping. His colleagues later register a continual plinking, like hail on a tin roof. Something hard is falling off of those racks. Some see flashes of light drifting down from the ceiling — heavy drops of flaming, liquified foam, dripping like melting plastic, onto weakening racks.  

As a rookie, Terry once charged into a burning building with a small team, despite the sound of cracks and groans. They reached a covered stairway moments before the ceiling beams snapped and a pile of flaming debris slammed down behind them. It's one of the only times he ever felt truly scared during a fire. So there is no way he's going to send anyone into that death trap freezer. Especially when they know there's no one left inside.

Madison doesn’t sacrifice its people for a building. 

If they stay on the loading dock itself, Terry reasons, behind the firewall, they can arc their hose spray through the door, down onto the flaming rubble. Maybe whatever happened up towards the ceiling burned itself out, and this is the remaining root of the problem. Maybe if they knock down these flames, they'll nip this fire in the bud. 

The strategy seems to work. Over the next 15, 20 minutes, the pillar of flame falls. Terry's pretty sure they've got this under control.

3:35 p.m.
Fire Station #1 

Unlike Terry, Fred Kinney planned to be on duty today. But he's also a little out of his element. 

He, likewise, started out on a different career track — a three-year stint as a barber — before the promise of stable work with solid benefits pulled him towards the force in 1966. In the early '70s, he became one of the city's first paramedics, and he spent the bulk of the next 15 years riding an ambulance without much thought of career advancement. He likes "the hands-on stuff, the action," as he puts it. He wants to "to stay active." 

Between his natural temperament and his experience working with people in moments of acute and often intensely personal crisis, Fred's cultivated an aura of calm and compassion. His speech is littered with minced, quasi-Zen aphorisms like, "The deal is: It is what it is." Or, "What you have do is, do what you have to do."  

That equanimity and a track record of stoic efficiency earned him the respect of his colleagues and the attention of the higher-ups. (He's tall, compact, and austere, but "just a peach of a guy," one firefighter tells me.) Over the last three years, they've pushed Fred towards higher and higher positions. And just months ago, they named him assistant chief for personnel. 

Now he spends his days in an office near the big mothership station at the center of town, making schedules, allocating manpower, and responding to the biggest fires as needed in order to set up chains of command. It's a far cry from the direct action of the ambulance. 

But it is what it is. He does his job as best he can. And on a quiet day like this one, that means filling out paperwork while keeping an ear out for any serious chatter on the radio. 

Then he hears the report from Station 5. The fire sounds big, which means it's time for him to report to the site and start managing personnel. 

Fred gathers his team, hops in the command car, and turns east out of Station 1. Almost instantly, he sees a column of smoke. Within 10 minutes, he's close enough to the building to see not just a tongue of flame, but a field of fire ripping across the roof. He radios in a second alarm — a call for backup — before he even arrives on site. 

Approx. 3:50 p.m. 
Central Storage & Warehouse, Madison Facility

One of Fred's guys hops into the dock and claps Terry on the shoulder. His team needs to pull out now. 

Kinney's crews head into the loading bay. Footage of uncertain origin, provided by the Madison Fire Department.

Terry's confused. He's pretty sure he's winning this fight. 

But knows that, like many firefighters, when he's pushing flames back, he gets so zoned in on the task, so committed to the charge, that he occasionally forgets he doesn't have the full picture of the fire. Sometimes, he even misses an important detail right in front of him. 

Like that time he was slowly driving a horizontal pillar of flame back down a long apartment hallway, only for his partner on the line to stop, and say they ought to turn off their hose, see what happens. As soon as they did, the flame burst right back, nearly engulfing them. 

It was a gas leak. They were never going to knock it down. If he'd pushed on and on and his hose lost pressure or suffered a complication, he'd have died. 

So he simply nods, follows this new guy outside, and sees the entire roof engulfed in flames. 

Okay, he was never going to win this. 

But how'd it get so apocalyptic? How did he not notice this?

May 3, 1991
3:35 p.m.
University of Wisconsin - Madison 

Jeff Bowen hears Fred call that second alarm on his radio as he strolls across campus. 

Unlike Fred and Terry, he's been drawn to firefighting since high school, when he saw a large fire in the distance while out driving posts into the ground on his family's farm in rural Pennsylvania. His father figured the fire might be a challenge for the local volunteer firefighters, and brought Jeff along to see what they could do to help. The next few hours he spent hauling hoses from a safe distance was "the most exciting thing I'd ever done," Jeff recalls. 

After a brief post-high school stint in the military, Jeff made a list of fire departments with paid, full-time positions. He set his sights on Madison because the application process could be completed in one day, rather than making multiple trips back and forth. It took him five tries over five years (while working as a civilian employee on a military base), but he made it onto the force in 1983 and got to business on the frontlines. He loved the mix of strict protocol and sudden action — the experience of dropping all his plans to respond to a crisis. 

Then, in 1990, he unexpectedly became a single father to a toddler. And he realized that it's pretty damn hard to find childcare when you work irregular, 24-hour shifts, with unexpected bouts of overtime. A svelte man in his mid-30s, with a mop of sandy brown hair, placid blue eyes, and a strong, slightly cleft chin, he's recently moved from the stations to a 9-to-5 protection post, doing fire safety inspections across the University. 

As a naturally curious guy, he's found joy in the work. It's relaxed enough that he can usually grab an ice cream at the student union and stroll across the campus, pausing to chat with professors about their work. He pokes around parts of the university few others ever see, and still gets the occasional opportunity to drop everything to respond to sudden chemical leaks or lab fires. Technically, his job in those moments is to liaise between the school and first responders. But he's got all his frontline gear in his car, just in case he gets the chance to charge in. 

Still, dealing with these university eggheads can be a pain. He speaks in checklists and bullet points — an artifact of his military training — whereas they're a little more absentminded. They keep volatile chemicals in the lab rather than a secured storage area, leave distilling apparati running unattended, and at least once a year totally gut a lab via chemical fires. He's trying to figure out what's wrong with the university safety systems, with the culture, and fix it. But that's an uphill battle. 

And of course, he misses the frontline.  

His radio's always on, but he's usually only listening for chatter about the university.

This fire catches his attention, though. It escalated to two alarms quickly, and the way folks are talking, it sounds like it's only going to get bigger. 

Growing up, he learned that if someone seems like they need help, and you have the ability to do something, you ought to at least go over and offer your assistance. That's the entire reason he wound up at that first fire as a kid. 

And Jeff believes he has one unique skill set: He knows a lot about sprinkler systems. 

The university labs are basically concrete slabs, so they rely on fire doors and walls to contain fires. Even nasty chemical blazes die quickly without oxygen. But, people leave the doors propped open all the time. In training, he read about newfangled fast-response sprinklers that can smother the gnarliest fires as soon as they start; they're the gold standard in prevention, but they're spreading slowly. So, he's made it his business to learn everything he can about these systems. Maybe someday he'll sell the university on them. 

He knows that a warehouse like CSW definitely has some kind of sprinkler system. Maybe Fred needs a specialist to come down, fiddle with some knobs, and beef it up.

It won't save the day. But sometimes a couple cranks on the old knob really can help. 

He doesn't have any inspections left on his schedule, and the university seems quiet. So he decides to make an exception and head down to CSW, to see about that sprinkler. 

Approx. 4:00 p.m.
Central Storage & Warehouse, Madison Facility

Jeff parks to a curb and heads for Fred’s labeled command car.  

As soon as he gets close, though, he recognizes a more experienced protection officer huddled up with the team. 

They seem to have a good grasp on the piping of the place. They're much more focused on the phrase "rack-supported structure." That's how CSW's materials describe the building, but it's new jargon to them. And it doesn't sound stable. 

They're right to worry. Because that's warehouse design speak for, We didn't think it was worth installing support beams. This building is held together by the stacks of food inside. 

If the stacks fall, the entire structure falls. 

This is not Jeff's area of expertise. He doesn't want to get in the way. 

But he's already here. He has his gear and he's a trained firefighter. And he wants to help. To be a part of the action. 

So he asks if there's anything he can do to assist them, as they focus on these big-picture issues. 

Fred's been here for about 15 minutes, setting up zones of autonomous control and chains of command around the warehouse to handle what's already clearly a landmark large fire. The department chief, a progressive reformer who's pushing the MFD to adopt the latest and best practices in fire science and emergency response, has been drilling this incident command stuff into Fred's head for over five years now. 

Fred's laid-back 'tude sometimes drifts into an "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" mentality. He kind of thought this was unnecessary overkill for the house fires that their teams usually dealt with. But he's glad of the big chief's foresight and training now. He's also feeling pretty lucky that, just months prior, he, the chief, and a few dozen other city officials went through a crisis response boot camp, run by the feds out in Maryland. They specifically walked through how to scale up incident command to respond to a mass disaster. 

When the trainer told him that most attendees use what they learned there within six months, Fred scoffed internally. Well, he has to admit, he was wrong and the trainer was prophetic. 

But this is the first time he's put these organizational skills to use in the field at this scale. Fred's spinning a ton of plates, all while trying to get his head around if and when this clearly flimsy structure might collapse, and how much damage it might do. 

So he asks Jeff to handle a headache for him: the bystanders. 

Some bystanders tried to get right up next to the blaze and chat with first responders. Photo courtesy of the Madison Fire Department.

This area's so sleepy, the biggest excitement of the last year was either that series of petty thefts over in neighboring Eastmorland, or the big curbside recycling program rollout and educational campaign. It's a tough call. 

It's also jam-packed with old folks and young families, attracted by comparatively low prices and a kid-friendly atmosphere. 

The endless procession of sirens has all of the blue-haired old ladies and the young moms stuck at home with babies concerned, and flocking down to Cottage Grove in droves. 

Some of them are worried about their homes. Many are just worried about Grover.

Grover is a polar bear. A large plaster polar bear, popping out like a basrelief from the CSW company sign on the warehouse's front lawn. Charming and family-friendly as the area may be, it's lacking in landmarks. Grover's one of the only symbols people recognize, and he's become an unofficial mascot for the locals — especially over the last two years, as CSW's started working with an area mom to dress him up in little hats, scarves, and sashes to celebrate every holiday. 

"My first thought was, 'I hope it won't destroy the bear,'" a little old man tells a reporter later in the day, when asked about hearing the sirens and deciding to come down and spectate. "I think an awful lot of that bear." 

The onlookers are calm. They mill about, watching the smoke. But the crowd's heading from dozens to hundreds. And a few more determined looky-loos are showing up now, with cameras and radios tuned to emergency channels. 

At least one of them is actually a fellow firefighter: Scott Strassburg, a volunteer in Blooming Grove, a community on the far eastern edge of Madison. 

A burly guy in his mid-20s with a bit of a biker aesthetic, he's one of those guys who loves taking things apart, figuring out how they work, and putting them back together. He's especially fond of fast cars. 

Unfortunately, he's also fond of alcohol. 

Three years ago, he had a couple close calls — let's leave it at that — and figured he'd survived for a reason. He just wasn't sure what that was yet. All he knew at the time was, he needed some structure in his life to keep him from going down a dark road while he figured things out. 

One of his friends, a volunteer firefighter, suggested Scott look into the small department close to his apartment. "Dude, if you're with the department, you can't drink," he told Scott. "You've got to be good."

Scott made inquiries and learned the team was short a softball player. Scott played ball when he was younger, so he started volunteering. The station chief told him they didn't expect Scott to stick around for more than two years, given where he was in his life. But here he was, still working on himself. 

He was off-duty , idling at home — about a mile east of CSW — when he smelled what at first seemed like a funky cookout, then grew increasingly potent, and rancid, like a grill left uncleaned for years. He peered outside, saw the tower of smoke, and figured this was a pretty big fire in the making. A chance to try out his own new shoulder-mounted camcorder.

Scott just wants to indulge his how'd-that-happen curiosity. But some of the rubberneckers want spectacle — to be close to a big incident. They've started to camp out in the big parking lot in front of CJ's, one of the only restaurants in the neighborhood.  

Although it's bland and beige from the outside, the inside is a Tudor pastiche of timber beams, a gaudy faux-candle chandelier, and a scattering of terrifying high-backed wooden chairs with pigs carved into the rear of the headrest, remnants of an era when this used to be an older supper club called The Pig's Ear. CJ's slings steak-and-potatoes dinners and cheap scotch to idling crowds of middle-aged regulars nightly. So, when folks started calling in asking if the waitresses could bring a meal out to their cars, the staff just asked for their license plate numbers, pulled out a stack of clamshell styrofoam takeout containers, and slopped in Friday fish dinner after Friday fish dinner. It's great business for them — one waitress on duty that evening recalls that she made three times her usual tips — but it is also fueling the inherently social aspect of a good disaster gawk fest. Thankfully, they stopped short of agreeing to take liquor out to the onlookers' cars.

For now, a small fleet of cops is keeping everyone in check, gently herding the cats back to the parking lot as they wander too close to the crews with a soft, we don't have any updates right now. They're mostly a danger to themselves, plopping downwind from a plume of acrid smoke for the joy of a quick gander. But as the crowd grows larger and bolder, it's becoming an issue for Fred's crew. 

Case in point, a gaggle of neighborhood kids on bikes has ‘80s moved its way into the alley east of Building 1. The youths are riding up and down, oohing and awing at the flames on the roof. 

Fred needs to move two vehicles down that alley, to lay some hose lines. 

The cops have their hands full with the bulk of the crowd, though. So he asks if Jeff can clear out the kids. 

No task is too big or too small. Jeff heads down the alley, past a fire investigator who’s just arrived to case the perimeter. The inspector notices a slight warp in the metal sheathing of the north wall, which it seems no one else has clocked — except Scott, looking through his zoom lens out in the crowd. A bit of a Mr. Fix-It, Scott's trying to figure out what's causing all of the weird irregularities he's seeing in the building. They both make a note of the warp, but no one else appears to be worrying about it. So they walk and pan on, respectively.  

The kids are surprisingly cooperative — unlike the grad students Jeff usually deals with, who constantly circle around and try to sneak back into their labs after he’s sealed off a fire or chemical spill. No respect for protocol. No common sense. 

But around the same time Jeff finishes clearing the alley, someone in the loading area screams, “the racks are coming down!” 

4:22 p.m.

The interior crew hears the collapse long before they see it. 

A low, grinding roar with a thumping, rhythmic undertone, like a freight train hammering down the tracks. 

At first, the firefighters hold their ground. It might actually be a train — there's a track right next to the warehouse. 

But as the sound grows, moving from the north end of the building towards them in the south, and falling racks perturb the wall of smoke, reality sets in and they fall back, fast. Still holding their lines, they take quick yet careful steps backward, their boots skidding in the ankle-deep water. Firewater shouldn't be this thick and greasy. 

Outside, Jeff and the investigator hear a strange, metallic clatter, like a plastic bag stuffed with cans twisting in the wind. They stop and look around, likewise thinking this might be a train coming down the nearby track. 

Without warning, the top third of the eastern wall buckles outward and the edges of the metal panel start to rip, with a sound somehow closer to tearing fabric than shearing metal. It unfurls, like the page of an open tin book flapping in the wind. 

And the not-a-train hurtles out. 

A wave of snarled steel beams, blackened and burning boxes, and melting … something. Indeterminate blocks of yellow-orange wax, on its way to sludge. 

Jeff is clear of the falling wall, and facing away from the collapse, which runs its course before he can even turn around. The investigator isn't so lucky. As soon as he sees the wall bulge out, on instinct, he runs to the other side of the alley and hurls himself under a raised platform, his radio skittering off behind him — as does a rain of red-hot debris. 

Across Cottage Grove, the rubberneckers gasp, then let out a boisterous cheer. They can't see what's happening in the alley. They're watching sections of the northern wall swing out like trap doors, or fall away like strips of steamed wallpaper. The panels wave almost weightless in the wind. Most of the warehouse's contents fell to the east and south, so all the crowd sees are genuinely impressive belches of black smoke and red flame bursting forward from behind each sheet. 

Sections of Building 1's north wall peel off and wave in the wind. Photo courtesy of the Madison Fire Department.

The collapse is far less amusing to a gaggle of reporters on the lawn, talking to a fire department spokesperson. They yelp as the first panel falls and scatter as a wave of heat pushes into their backs. But it's downright worrying Fred's crew. Most buildings collapse slowly, in isolated chunks, not massive sections. This fire is not only huge, it's fast. And strange. 

Scott keeps filming, focused on the waving panels — the action shots. He doesn't notice the trickle of thick, frothy liquid burbling out of the rubble, down the lawn. It's not hose runoff. That's mostly clear. This is beige, with a greasy sheen on top. It pools up in a drainage ditch between the lawn and the road; within an hour, it'll fill the five-foot depression and spill into the road. As the night cools, it'll congeal, forming a thick, viscous, batter-like skin. 

The pooling butter-water sludge. Footage of uncertain origin, provided by the Madison Fire Department.

But even the firefighters who clock the ooze aren't worried about it now. It's not the immediate threat. 

Jeff stands at the end of the alley, surveying the wreckage. 

“Wow, oh shit,” he thinks. “We’ve probably got somebody underneath that.”

One of the vehicles Fred sent through behind Jeff is clear of the collapse, not too far from him. But he can't spot the other one. Or the investigator. Or the crew Fred had up on the roof when Jeff arrived. 

Fred, however, is not worried. 

He saw both vehicles make it through. The one Jeff can't see was only feet away from the collapse. That engine's commander had been grumbling, minutes before, about getting pulled off his lunch to help Station 5 deal with this fire. One of his young recruits caught a perch earlier in the day, and they had to throw it in the freezer rather than put it straight on the grill. "What the fuck do you think burns in a freezer?” he’d snapped at the recruit. 

But after the initial collapse, he shifted from grumpy to urgent in an instant, screaming for his crew to floor it and clear the rest of the alley before any more of the wall fell. 

And minutes after he'd dispatched Jeff, Fred had decided that, yeah, this building looked pretty flimsy to him. So he sent a runner to take that crew off the roof. He'd just dispatched another to chew out a local news crew that'd clambered onto a neighboring building to get a good shot, when one of the roof guys, an old softball buddy of Fred's, stormed over in a huff. 

"We had that fire," he shouted. "Why'd you pull us off? We could've saved the building!" 

Fred understood his frustration. Firefighters rarely meet a fire they can't control to some extent. It's sometimes hard to admit that they're getting pushed back. And sure, this might have been a cautious call on his part. But that's his job: protect his people. 

"There's no way we're gonna lose anybody," he replied, matter-of-factly. 

Then the wall came down. 

Fred doesn't give himself much credit for making a good call, or a close call. To him, it was just the right call to make in the moment. Now he has to focus on finding the next right call. Focus on the job and what's at hand, not what could have been. 

But one of the Station 5 guys, who Fred put in charge of managing the rear loading dock crew after his team tapped Terry out, would call his wife later that night. His father was a firefighter, so he knew the drill. So did his wife. He's a steady presence. But this time, he told her, they came so close to losing some of their guys that it got to him. Whether it's relief, fear of what could have been, or a simple adrenaline crash, something cracks through his cool demeanor. He gives himself a moment to sob on the phone. 

In the aftermath of the collapse, Jeff lingers. Amidst the sharp scents of hot metal and charred food, swiftly moving from an acrid sting to an unctuous and retching stench of rot, he catches a smell he recognizes from the university labs: ammonia. A hefty amount of ammonia. 

Elsewhere, as firefighters pull back from the loading area, which has not yet collapsed — that firewall is sturdier than anyone expected —  some spot wisps of light green flame lick out of exposed, fractured pipes. 

Jeff knows ammonia’s not the most dangerous chemical in low doses. 

But it’s caustic and flammable. And it’s a common industrial refrigerant. So if there’s a giant vat of it somewhere, and it goes up in flames, then that’s probably going to be a serious problem.  

Fred knows about the ammonia. There’s a 7,750-pound tank of the stuff — a gigantic white cylinder — about 40 feet behind Building 1’s loading area. His team shut off the pipes between the tank and the rest of the facility soon after they‘d arrived. 

Fred's not sure what will happen if the tank itself ends up bathed in flame, but he knows he doesn't want to find out.

Scott caught wind of their chatter about the ammonia tanks moments after the wall collapsed, and decided to dip out, just in case things got a little too spicy. However, most of the bystanders stuck around. CJ's massive parking lot is filling up rapidly, and some folks are climbing up onto a nearby overpass to get a better vantage on the flames — putting themselves right in the waft zone of a potential chemical fog cloud. In fact, police are now closing the overpass because the thick smoke has already caused a few minor accidents.

Still, Fred's not worried. The loading area isn’t safe, but it’s not a giant pile of rubble like the freezer section of the building. And even if it was, the flames wouldn’t leap such a massive horizontal gap — certainly not long enough to superheat the tank. 

He’s concerned about Building 2, another giant freezer. It’s only a couple yards west from Building 1, and it's connected to the flaming building by a narrow, covered walkway. A corridor of mechanical equipment connects Building 2 to Building 5 — and that structure not only runs south right beside the tank, it also apparently contains an unknown amount of unspecified hazardous materials. 

Fred just needs to hold the line. But he’ll need more men.

4:30 p.m.

He calls in a third alarm. 

Jeff reports back to the makeshift command center in a fog. Fred's boss, the big chief, is on the scene now. He wants Jeff to haul a master stream — a high-pressure water gun, capable of blasting out about 1,000 gallons a minute — between Building 1 and 2 to hold the flames at bay. 

Jeff nods and takes the gun. He's in this now. And it's his ex's weekend with his son, so he doesn't need to worry about childcare tonight.

The west wall of Building 1 hasn’t collapsed yet, so the corridor is clear. But “the fire’s coming at us like a freight train now, and I’m seeing discoloration on the wall,” Jeff recalls. He starts to worry, as he closes in, that this wall too is going to collapse into the alley. 

He thinks fast. There’s a metal staircase running up the side of Building 2. It looks solid. If the wall comes down, he can huddle under it like the investigator under the platform and probably survive for a long time before the fire gets him. He tells the closest firefighter, “I’ll be under the stairwell. If the wall comes down, don’t forget about me.” 

Then he starts setting up the water gun. Five minutes. The wall holds. Ten. It's still there. Fifteen. Almost done, but every minute is another risk. And yet, it holds just long enough. 

Once the stream is on, Jeff retreats right quickly to seek another (hopefully safer) task. And another. And another. 

The evening blends together, in a back-and-forth grind to fetch more hoses, set up new lines, bulk out the curtain of water holding the fire at bay. But every trip is a little harder. 

Some of that’s a gradual sense of fatigue. Some of it’s the fact that he’s got to cross the drainage ditch to grab gear. 

At first, crossing the ditch is just a quick scramble. The ooze running along the bottom is slick, but fire boots have good traction, and Jeff, like most of the guys on scene, has your standard Midwestern experience tottering along icy roads. 

But after a while, it’s up to his calves, and it feels like they’re sloshing through water. Then it’s up to his thighs, his waist, his chest. It’s getting so thick he and his comrades have trouble hauling their hoses through it and come out laden down with waxy chunks clinging to their gear. 

The smell takes its toll as well. It's not just rancid but caustic and chemically — burned fat cut with melting plastic. And the smoke itself is greasy. It seeps into the fabric of their gear, creating a film on their skin, imprinting the stench onto their flesh. It will cling to them for days — and to some of the rigs for years, slithering out of the crevices back into the air on hot days. 

It's stomach-churning. It stings. The firefighters muscle through it. They have masks and air canisters after all. Some are so locked in, they can ignore the stench. But it still scrapes the throat and reddens the eyes. 

Fred's command team keeps a steady stream of water trained on the center of Building 1 as well, in a futile bid to blunt the oncoming flames at their source. But firefighters will later realize these streams are sloshing debris into crates and racks, sending periodic waves of food along with a constant flow of dairy slurry washing out of the rubble. 

Watching a line of canned hams roll down the lawn, and bob along the filled ditch makes some of the guys chuckle — including Terry, the first-in officer. He was on a break, resting in Station 5, when the wall came down, but now he's stationed on the other side of that collapse site, pouring water into the ruins. Terry loves ham, and so, to him, the sight of flame-burst cans of Oscar Mayer Jubilees (a very decent ham in his opinion) is both tragic and hilarious. 

But the molten, two-foot deli-style bricks of cheese rolling out of the wreckage at irregular intervals, forcing men to drop their lines and scatter, keep most of the firefighters downhill on edge. 

“If they hit you, they’d have killed you,” recalls one of the Station 5 guys. “I spent 28 years in the fire service, and … you just don’t expect to see something like that, ever.” 

And it’s all happening so fast. 

4:52 p.m.

A stiff westward wind pushes a burst of flames through the covered corridor harder than the lines of water — even Jeff's master stream — can resist. It breaches Building 2. 

The westward marching flames breach Building 2. Photo courtesy of the Madison Fire Department.

6:15 p.m.

The fire spreads throughout Building 2’s freezer as well, and its walls start to buckle. Command’s already called in a fourth alarm, but they’re spreading the department thin. They’ve got maybe 70 guys on site, yet they still need a few folks out there to respond to other incidents. 

Some knuckleheads at the university just threw a flaming mattress down a dorm elevator shaft. What if that fire spreads out of control at the same time? “The university,” one firefighter grumbles as he recalls this. “Lot of shitbirds up there, yeah.”

The fact that this new fire doesn't spiral as well is dumb luck more than anything else. 

So Fred's command team starts sending out requests for aid from neighboring departments, first those on the edge of the city, like Scott's. Blooming Grove calls Scott back to the station — a Quonset hut with three of the oldest trucks in the area and only two metal oxygen tanks between the team — to gear up and prepare to handle calls on the eastern fringe of the city, to take the pressure off the pros. 

But even with this influx of men, as the sun sets, it’s clear the initial containment perimeter won’t hold. 

Approx. 7:00 p.m.

The flames are probing that mechanical corridor, closer to the ammonia tank than anyone would like. So the commanders decide to pull back, set a new perimeter, and send two lines of men into the covered dock running along the side of Building 5. The dock is a maybe 10-foot-wide corridor the fire would need to course down in order to hit the tank. 

They send a team up onto the roof as well, to pump a stream of water onto the ammonia, keeping them wet and cool.  

I've tracked down five guys who were in the corridor that night. And they all agree on this:

The dock is a nightmare. It’s almost knee-deep in that greasy ooze, so thick that it takes three or four men “giving it the old heave-ho,” as one of them puts it, to push through with a hose that one guy could usually jog along with on his own. 

The teams advance slowly up the corridor, turn on the stream, and suddenly blast backward, propelled along the slick surface by the jet of water. Within minutes, they’re back at the entrance to the dock, and they have to shut down the hoses, heave their way back through the muck, and restore the stream — only to slowly glide backward again. 

Often, as they skate back, someone loses their footing. The lucky ones drop to their knees. The rest just try to land on their backs, so they don’t bury their faces in the muck. The more they fall, the more of the gunk soaks into the fabric of their gear. The weight builds up, maybe ten pounds of dairy packed into their boots and pants. If they get close enough to the flames, a few guys swear, their sleeves ignite like candles. They push for hours, their muscles turning to jelly.

The guys who are on the ladders or the roofs of neighboring buildings throughout the evening, like Jeff and Terry, luck out. They're clear of the slurry. And some of them, including Jeff, haven't even heard that the fire's encroaching on the tanks. Honestly, Terry says, the evening's pretty boring for them, simply keeping the stream steady while shooting the shit with whoever's nearby hour after hour after hour. 

But these high-point guys still have to walk through a thin layer of sludge, which coats the entire site by this point, and their boots are slathered in grease. If they make it to their post, they’re fine. Every step up a metal ladder, though, involves a butt-puckering moment of slipping and sliding. The climbs are slow and strenuous. Below them, fire trucks skid and spin as they try to move into supportive positions. Men are dropping slippery hoses, losing them in muck and murk.

As they struggle, the fire pushes forward. 

All the while, the persistent crowd of bystanders — increasingly male and mulleted — continues expanding along the other side of Cottage Grove, gawping at the flames as they reflect off of the sludge river's grease-sheen surface, creating an orange glow across the ground and the sky.

It is literally an aurora. Localized entirely over this freezer. Cut with the occasional whiff of steamed hams. 

Approx. 10:30 p.m.

A few hours into this nighttime slog, Fred gets some bad news. With aid from CSW admins, a team searched Building 5 to figure out what hazardous materials, exactly, are in there. They found 50 drums of something called Pure de Banana Boria, 32 of Rennilase Type X, and a several more miscellaneous containers. They relayed the names to a hazmat call center, who confirmed the barrels contain hydrochloric acid, sulfuric acid, potassium hydroxide, and a pharmacist’s catalogue of other dangerous substances. That team is carting the drums away, but who knows if they’ve found everything.  

Fred still thinks they can hold the line. He's a calm, competent optimist. But concern’s setting in. 

He calls an emergency response specialist back at HQ, and says he’s starting to think about evacuating the area. But he’s not sure if he’s jumping the gun. Should he take that drastic step if they can still control this? 

The specialist is not calm. When he hears about the ammonia, he does some quick napkin math, and determines there is a real risk of "a catastrophic detonation," as he puts it. He maintains his professional demeanor, though, and simply reassures Fred that he's not overreacting. 

“Bottom line is, when you think maybe you should do it,” he replies, “just do it.”

Approx. 11:30 p.m.

Fred makes the call. 

Cops fan out over residential streets over a half-mile radius around the warehouse, shouting warnings through bullhorns while wearing gas masks. 

A few folks on closed culs-de-sac off the main streets sleep through the sirens. But many of their neighbors belong to freakishly active neighborhood associations — the sort that organize regular skate nights for kids, themed dances for adults, and monthly newsletters with neighborhood updates, lost and found notices, and babysitter call lists that go out via Boy Scout troops and volunteers to every home without fail. (The fumes already spoiled a Spring Spectacular dance at one of the schools, and the evacuation's now breaking up an all-night lock-in at the local YMCA.) These helpful busybodies join the more proactive cops, knocking on doors until someone gets up, so they can be absolutely sure that everyone knows they really ought to skedaddle.

An estimated 3,000 people leave their homes. Many seek shelter with friends and family elsewhere in the city — including Scott's pregnant wife. He actually shuffled her off with the dog after he caught wind the evacuation was under discussion, but before the police moved out. About 500 end up at a local high school, where they queue up silently, clutching tiny dogs, Simpsons pillows, and duffle bags with changes of underwear, to register their presence with the Red Cross. The organization is working with a team of HAM radio operators — not pros, but amateur enthusiasts from around Dane County who pull together to help whenever a disaster occurs — to coordinate donations of cots, blankets, and KFC and McDonald's meals. They've been told these people will probably be here for at least five to eight hours, if not longer.

Evacuated families settle in at the high school gym. Footage of uncertain origin, provided by the Madison Fire Department.

Some folks gripe — especially a handful of older men who think the firefighters are making a big deal out of nothing. "I was rather wanting to sleep tonight," a man with thick jowls and a dour scowl tells a reporter. "They changed it from, 'We'd like you to leave,' to, 'You have to leave.' So I finally left. I didn't feel it was dangerous." 

A reverend, in town for the weekend to preach to a local congregation, shakes his head. "I just picked the wrong night," he laments, to a reporter.

But most of the temporary refugees quietly lay out the gym's tumbling mats and set the local kids up to get some sleep. (Several younglings insist on staying up, zooming around in excitement or playing with their Tonka big trucks).  Some adults collapse on the wooden floors, caps pulled over their eyes, hoping to catch some Zs. At least tomorrow's a Saturday. A gaggle of older women find some folding chairs and set up a circle, chatting through the evening. To some, this is just an unplanned social event — a chance to "see people you don't see all the time," as one old man tells a reporter, chuckling. "It's kind of nice." 

“There wasn’t that kind of panic happening,” recalls a then-cub reporter for the Wisconsin State Journal who’d watched the walls come down, spent the evening slipping through sludge to talk to first responders, and was now covering the evacuation. “People in Madison are generally nice and calm, even in the face of extreme events.”

“It’s fairly typical Midwestern behavior.”

But back in that dock corridor, things look a little different. The firefighting squad hasn’t spoken to the emergency response specialist, but they've reached the same conclusion, that there's absolutely something to worry about. As one of them puts it, “if the tank explodes… we’ll probably be cooked.” The blast could “take out all the warehouses nearby,” another adds, doing real damage to the entire neighborhood. 

A freezer of butter’s not worth dying for. A neighborhood, though? Maybe. 

The corridor itself might not hold forever, though. Unlike Building 1, it’s supported by large steel beams rather than storage racks, and there’s a concrete wall between the mechanical corridor and the next freezer. Yet the breams are so hot they’re glowing red, and mortar crumbles, the walls slowly shift. 

The Station 5 guy Fred put in charge of the corridor team is sending regular reports back to the command center, where Fred is trying to comfort the warehouse's increasingly distraught owner. Initially, Fred hoped he could get some useful information out of the guy, but it seemed like that wasn't going to happen. He just needs reassurance, information, and human compassion. 

The corridor commander shares his assessment: If that mortar breaks and the stone wall falls back into the freezer, they're fine. But if it falls out into the corridor, they're screwed. 

1:30 a.m. 

The fire surges forward. 

The corridor might be done for. 

The Station 5 guy calls the men back, ever determined not to lose any of them. He leaves an automated hose to blast at that wall, hoping the force will push it back inwards, as they retreat. 

But practically speaking, the men on the roof are the last line. 

“I’ve been in a lot of fires over the years, and I’ve been pushed out of buildings. Backdrafts and things, you know,” one of these guys later recalls. “But this was on another level — a fire that’s controlling you. You’re not controlling that fire at all.” 

This is the only moment Fred feels fear creeping up on him. Every time a smoke screen blows over the guys on the roof, he’s not sure he’ll see them again when it clears. 

A nail-biting hour passes. 

The corridor commander tells his team that they don't need to stay. They've done everything they can. The captains will stand by as long as possible, but everyone else has done their duty. 

No one budges. The corridor crew is here to see this through.

"We're optimists," one of the guys tells me. By personal inclination and by training. That's all there is to it. 

The men sit tight. All they can do is wait.

Then, the fire abates for a moment. No one's sure why. But it's an opening. Emboldened, the hose teams charge back in and push the fire back and back and back. 

3:30 a.m. 

Around 30 minutes after the final evacuees arrived at a second high school, opened up to accommodate overflow, Fred and his guys are sure they’ve finally contained the flames. 

They lift the evacuation order. 

4:06 a.m. 

The crew has established a new, firm perimeter. It's holding. The worst of the fire is over. Now, they simply need to maintain this curtain of protective, suppressive water. 

But they’re not out of the woods yet. There’s still the issue of… that sludge. 

It’s so deep and murky now that people aren’t sure where the ditch is. Off-duty MFD officers and guys reporting in from other departments walk on site, only to drop down five feet. The viscous suction attempts to claw their boots off as they scrabble for footing. 

As the perimeter expands, they also find landmines: Man-sized holes, several feet deep, freshly dug as part of a nascent landscaping project. One firefighter, who's just arrived, shuffles through the muck, using his feet to follow a submerged hose line back to its source, only to take a chance step straight down a hole. "My first thought is, 'I'm going to die at a butter fire in Wisconsin,'" he recalls. "'I'll be a laughable headline around the world.'" 

After a moment of genuine panic, he thrusts an arm out of the hole and calls for help. A man with solid grip strength rushes over, clasps his slicked forearm, and slowly pops him out like a human pimple. 

Scott arrives on site as the sun crests the horizon. He clocks the gunk, and the MFD guys up to their shoulders in sludge. But the Blooming Grove crew he arrives with is assigned to a series of aerial ladders and roofs, back and forth and up and down, but never through the ditch. 

He grins, feeling a bit smug. He's managed to stay nice and clean while all the pros are up to their shoulders in increasingly thick clumps of yellow-brown muck. But after several hours manning a water gun just below Grover the polar bear — who's draped in decorative fire gear now —  he slips up. Literally.

Firefighters drape Grover in some of their excess gear. Footage of uncertain origin, provided by the Madison Fire Department.

On a brief break, he stretches and steps off the platform — right into the nearby ditch. 

“I couldn’t get my feet underneath me,” he recalls. “My gear is filling up with this stuff, which is very heavy.” 

He starts to slip below the surface of the butter. Sure, it's not that deep, but he fell at a diagonal and he can't get himself out of the rut. For a moment, real fear replaces his smug smile. 

Then a hulking figure grabs the back of his coat and hauls him out. His gloves, his boots, his turnout coat and pants — they're all loaded with butter. But at least he still has his boots. 

When he gets out, his crew won’t let him ride in the truck on the way home. He’s just too gross. “They made me ride on top, up on the hose bed.” 

Jeff, conversely, lucks out. Like everyone, he's got a layer of butter gunk up to his shins, but he's avoided the worst of the mess. And as he trudges back to his car, he realizes it’s just above the butter line, up on the curb. An excavator’s also driving by, clearing a brief path on Cottage Grove. Exhausted, he seizes this brief opening and skids off, away from the fire, to get some rest. 

He's done his part. 

Terry and Fred will stay on site for another hour or two, writing up initial reports and making sure their teams are ready for hand off. Terry worries that he might get called back over the next few days. There's just so much left to do. But Fred's done. Sure, he'll check in over the radio now and then in the coming days, maybe drive by the site. However, he knows other leaders, the more gung-ho guys who live to fight big fires and order the troops around the field, want their turn at the warehouse. 

He's happy to turn it over to them.  

Until this point, most folks were too busy to think about what the shit they were slipping over and plunging into actually was. But as it firms up into yellow-brown chunks, and as the sun rises, it becomes increasingly clear that it’s a slurry of butter-water, with chunks of meat, baked goods, and produce bobbing in it. 

And it’s headed towards nearby Lake Monona. 

6:00 p.m, May 3rd, 1991 
A Road in Central Madison, Wisconsin

Duane Sippola lives for efficiency. 

In 1960, after a five-year stint in the military and a year at a hardware distribution hub, he took a job as a laborer for Madison's city engineering department, quickly earning a reputation as a decisive and intuitive problem solver, and as someone who never dropped the ball. His bosses had so much faith in his project management skills that they put him in charge of the city's sidewalks in 1968. He grew frustrated, balancing the need to work in the field, supervising repairs or construction, and the need to stay at his desk downtown to respond to calls from other sites or concerned citizens. So he got his hands on an old, specialized two-way police radio, retooled to place and receive calls, essentially creating a proto-cell phone. 

He's not sure why he cares so much about efficient communication and response — why he goes to these lengths. It's just who he is. Two years prior, he'd earned a promotion, becoming the supervisor for a set of emergency repair crews. The work is reactive by nature: he'll dispatch a crew to fix a water main after a break, or to a storm sewer after a flood. But he always wants to be on site as soon as possible — ideally before anyone has to call him to report an issue. So he keeps his radio on, tuned to emergency frequencies, throughout the day. 

He's driving home now. Supper's on the table and his wife's waiting. He's heard a little chatter throughout the afternoon about a big fire over at Central Storage & Warehouse. Fires often create engineering headaches, but he's not sure when or how he'll be useful yet. Suddenly, he hears from one of his crews in the area. They took a look at the site, and it's a mess, they say through the radio, which Duane keeps on even when driving. But they're not sure what to do. 

Duane makes a quick turn. Supper can wait. Clearly, he needs to take a look for himself. 

A slight man in his early 50s, with a tall forehead and an angular jaw, he's an unassuming presence, so no one pays him much attention as he crosses Cottage Road on foot and starts poking around the site. That suits him fine. He doesn't like dealing with chains of command or the powers that be. He just wants to figure out what's going on here, and how to fix it.

Duane's scanning the path of the channel, down the side of the road to a depression under that overpass the gawkers are gathered on. He sees what has become a big, makeshift pool. It's filling up fast. At the far end of the divot, he spots an exit culvert. 

Instantly, Duane surges into action. Because he knows that drainage hole leads to a concrete canal that runs through the older Eastmorland neighborhood. It's meant to channel rainwater and snowmelt down into Starkweather Creek, a fast-flowing stream that empties out into the nearby Lake Monona. 

Duane likewise doesn’t know what this goop is at first, but it doesn’t look safe. 

Madisonians love their lakes. Duane takes the occasional boat trip himself, and his daughter loves skiing on the lake.

The city also just finished a major cleanup of Monona, and a push to rehabilitate the shoreline. It’s nearly spawning season as well, a sensitive time for the various fish species in the area. 

So Duane has to stop the goo, lest all that work be undone, breaking lake lovers' hearts. 

There's no more room for introspection now. He's in problem-solving mode. Break the issue down into steps. Tackle one at a time. Keep trying solutions until you can move forward. 

He calls one of the foremen who works under him and tells him to head to the nearest hardware store and grab some large plywood sheets, planks of wood, and sand, stone, or other fill material. In a stroke of luck, he learns there’s a crew nearby, who just finished an emergency water main repair. They're not his guys, and maybe he should ask for permission before talking to them. But that's not efficient. If he waits for the brass to sort things out, this gunk could be in the lake by the time they authorize a team transfer. So he walks over, and asks if he can requisition them and their heavy equipment. His boss will smooth things out with theirs later. 

They agree.

Within minutes, someone arrives with a four-by-eight sheet of plywood, and Duane slams it down in front of the culvert, dumps stones in front of it to secure it in place, and prays it'll create an effective seal. 

He’s honestly not sure it will, but it's the best, quickest solution he can think of right now, so it's worth a shot. 

The plug holds. The depression slowly fills with goop rather than funneling it towards the lake, giving Duane a moment to reevaluate. He notices the firefighters struggling to navigate the ditch. He grabs his team and gets to work. They throw down planks of wood, side by side, crafting two crude footbridges over the mess — improvised crossings, the kind soldiers might’ve built under fire in another kind of battle.

The boards won’t last forever. By dawn, they’ll vanish beneath the creeping butter line. But for the most critical hours of the fire — until around 1 a.m. —  they hold. Just long enough to keep the fight alive.

Around this time, Duane's boss arrives on site. They huddle, breaking down the situation. The sludge just keeps coming. Eventually it’s going to spill over into the drainage channel. 

But they have a sort of home-court advantage: Duane's boss built that channel himself back in 1968. He knows it in and out. So his boss heads down the channel to figure out how he might be able to stop whatever slips past the makeshift holding pond.  

Duane stays back and directs the water crew's excavator to push congealed butter out of the responders’ path, into his little dairy lagoon. Then he directs them across a railroad track, where he’s spotted another divot in the ground and starts widening and flattening it into a second containment pond. 

Duane's team pumps sludge from Pond One into Pond Two. Photo courtesy of the Madison Fire Department.

Still, the butter-water keeps coming. At the peak of the fire, responders pump 5,000 gallons of water on the blaze per minute. They use so much, some firefighters can’t get pressure in their hoses. The grid is drained. Duane's ponds fill quickly, but they buy his boss time. 

Like Duane, he turns to plywood, simple but effective. He drives down the channel, to three choke points where he can slow the flow, allowing water to pass but hopefully catching larger chunks of coagulated dairy. He has three dams that can fill up before the sludge hits the creek. 

Approx. 8:00 p.m. 

As reporters break into prime-time shows with updates on the fire, Duane's boss calls his counterpart at the sewer system for permission to pump sludge into the storm drains. Granted. The sewer team will just have to monitor for grease build-up. 

With their dams constructed, Duane and his boss set up crews, who haul basketball-sized chunks of congealed butter and mangled meat out of the ponds by hand, into trucks that run in a circuit back and forth to and from the landfill. Tanker trucks suck liquid grease off the top of the ponds and haul it away to a specialized recycling facility in massive loads. And the gunky water itself gets flushed away. It’s a steady, methodical process. 

This drainage system keeps the butter from pooling up around the warehouse — and out of the lake. It’s a brilliant, instinctual fix. But as rain starts to fall, it seems like it might not be enough. The sludge washes in faster than Duane's guys can suck and flush it out, topping one dam after another. The water line rises up and up the final plywood plug, and the men prepare for the worst. They can’t block up the creek, but maybe they can put some inflatable booms out to collect the chunks. Emulsified butter will still hit the lake, the salt and grease doing real damage. But at least a layer of gunk won’t spread on top, choking out oxygen and stinking out the city. 

The waters rise and rise and rise. Duane's boss glances over periodically as the plywood disappears. He's oddly nonchalant. If the worst comes to pass  — and it truly may  — he'll do his best with the booms. Act. React.  

"We hope that what we do will be enough," explains Duane. "That's all… There's nothing else you can do. If it's not stopping, I have to keep looking ahead. How do I stay ahead of this?" 

Then the rain stops. The sludge stabilizes just an inch or two short of the top of the final plywood plug.

Their crews let out a sigh of relief. It’s a win by chance. 

But a win is a win. 

Mid-Morning, May 4th, 1991
Central Storage & Warehouse, Madison Facility

The site still looks like a disaster. But Fred's replacement, who tapped him out just after dawn, is now treating this less like a developing crisis and more like "a normal fire," as one of the first responders puts it. They just need to maintain the lines. So the job is now about managing amped-up out-of towners like Patrick Burns from Mount Horeb. 

I’ve found at least a half dozen folks who responded to the fire on May 3rd and wound up staying on site far longer than they should have, up to 34 hours straight, simply because no one realized how long they’d been there or came to relieve them. Most were off-duty guys who came in on their own like Jeff, or got called in early on to help. They figured this was just a major crisis they needed to push through. And some were pretty sanguine about the experience. 

“I saw two sunrises,” one of the guys who fought the corridor fire told me. “I was real happy about that. A pinnacle thing for my career.”

But others knew they were pushing themselves too far. “I learned that you can’t just have diet pops that’re full of caffeine,” a Station 5 guy who was also there for the fight to save the ammonia tank, told me. “We just got over-caffeinated. Or at least I did… by 10 p.m. the next night, I was just goofy. My blood pressure went through the roof. My heart rhythm was erratic.”

“So I kind of discharged myself.”

Bedraggled firefighters step away from the smoldering warehouse. Photo courtesy of the Madison Fire Department.

Those are the bedraggled souls Patrick sees trickling out of the site. 

Patrick's colleagues had nominated him to go up on the ladder because he was one of the youngest guys on the team. His fresh knees could take the slippery climb, and the hours of jostling. When he comes down after a shift, he says, he feels like a newborn foal wobbling around. The rest of the Mount Horeb contingent trundles around the site, just above the slime line in the brush truck, delivering supplies to stranded engines and scattered crews.

Around this point, the Madison crews finally take a delirious breath. Station 5 has turned into a joyous madhouse, the long folding table in the break room laden down as nearby restaurants send free burgers and pizzas. CJ's, for its part, sends plenty of steak and potato-type fare. Dozens of neighborhood families too, worried about the strain on firefighters they see riding along their streets, participating in their little summer parades and social events, arrive in waves with pastel tupperware full of mysterious casseroles and other creature comforts. A mother arrives with cookies baked by her young daughter who, she explains, insisted they do something for the firefighters. Children at a nearby daycare are also scraping together $20 to help clean Grover the Bear. 

“Man, big city firefighting is great!,” Patrick says. “They feed you when you show up!”

Out of curiosity, a few slap-happy firefighters start fishing boxes and cans out of the “butter river,” as the ditch is now known. “There are tins about a foot wide, two or three deep, and we open them up and inside it looks like there’s a hockey puck,” a Station 5 guy tells me. They laugh, bemused, trying to figure out what the hell this thing is. “Come to find, it’s fruitcake, cooked in its container down to this little black puck.” 

A couple, tired and hungry, pick up cans of ham, tossing those that exploded and taking the ostensibly fine ones back to the station, where their wives arrive with bread and condiments. They pry them open, and make sandwiches. Terry takes one.

"It was good," he says, clearly pleased with the memory. 

There are too many firefighters to fit in the station, though. Some cluster around a Salvation Army food truck, manned by retirees from the surrounding neighborhoods. A local restaurant is pumping out gallons of coffee, which the owner's daughter carries over in milk jugs. The volunteers leave dixie cups by carafes of coffee on the truck's window counter, and cardboard boxes of donuts out for the picking. 

Responders stock up at the Salvation Army's mobile canteen truck. Photo courtesy of the Madison Fire Department.

Other firefighters retreat into a city bus, manned by a distraught city driver who'd just gotten it back from a cleaning, where they collapse on the benches and catch a little shut-eye. The city's fleet services are determined to help their brothers in the fire department, though, no matter how gross the task might be. One employee throws on a pair of rubber waders, drives to the warehouse, and hauls diesel in metal canisters, by hand, through the mire to keep the butter-logged and stranded fire engines running. 

A Madison fleet services employee wades through butter gunk with diesel jugs. Photo courtesy of the Madison Fire Department.

But Scott manages to drop by the station, and the camaraderie he witnesses there — the joy the firefighters feel in a qualified success, and the locals feel in supporting their first responders  — flips a switch in his mind. He starts to feel, viscerally, perhaps for the first time just how much this job can mean to a community.  

Fred and his team have set up a makeshift emergency command center at a big table in CJ's, where they brief CSW employees, city officials, the press, and a rapidly spawning mob of insurance representatives and lawyers. A neighboring warehouse manager opens his doors to the CSW staff, who use his office to manage their own response. 

CSW wants to bring in carpenters and engineers ASAP, to reseal the remaining fridges, get coolant flowing again and limit their losses. 

The fire destroyed enough. Oscar Mayer announces they’ll likely have to add hours at their local plants in order to replace all the hot dogs they lost to the fire, if they want to meet July 4th cookout demand. And the feds, who bought and stashed all of that butter as part of a dairy price stabilization program, try to recoup their losses with what Duane and his boss consider a particularly hairbrained scheme: They scoop gobs of sludge into a railroad tanker car, heating it up to skim off the butter grease alone, transferring it into cardboard containers, and re-cool it. They believe they can sell this dicey butter as a livestock feed additive. According to later lawsuits, they do manage to make $43,000 on the venture. 

“But it doesn’t work well,” Duane recalls. “The project gets abandoned right after it starts.” He suspects, based on the little he sees and hears directly, that they couldn't stop the butter from splashing all over everything in the transfer process.

The suits want news on the fire investigations. Who's gonna be on the hook for all of this? The investigator who was nearly crushed by the falling east wall is still on the case, poking his head in wherever it's safe to do so, making notes and snapping pictures. But it'll take weeks to finalize his report. Conclusion: The warehouse workers probably should have called 911 before going in with their own extinguishers, but ultimately… blame the damned rogue forklift. 

Locals, returning to their homes, are mostly unsurprised to find the neighborhood intact. Few know how close they came to some sort of massive environmental disaster, be it an ammonia fog cloud or a butter oil spill. They gripe about the putrid stench, the slick roads, the throngs of reporters, and what all of this will mean for traffic and commutes in the coming days. 

But almost all rejoice as they see the polar bear sign still stands. “Kids of east Madison can breathe a sigh of relief,” the State Journal reports on Sunday. “The polar bear will live forever,” a CSW rep promises. 

Grover thanks his saviors. Photo courtesy of the Madison Fire Department.

Firefighters start to worry that something else will stick around forever, too: The butter in their gear. 

They figure out that standing under an engine’s exhaust pipe will melt the goop off, enough to remove all that excess weight. But it’s still caked in pretty deep. Some of the hoses are too slick and bogged down to handle, and guys are running through their stations’ extra gear way too fast. A simple wash doesn’t seem to do much. In Station 5, they start shoving butter-soaked gear into plastic bags, in hopes they can find a solution later. Someone quips it’ll ferment before they can. 

Watching the pros brush butter off their shoulders, Patrick grimaces, any excitement he felt about this chance to make connections and build skill in the city fade in light of a dire revelation: As the newbie, he knows it’ll be his job to clean their gear once they’re back in Mount Horeb. He’ll ultimately spend more time on that than he did at the fire, and even with the help of another volunteer who works as a janitor and knows all the tricks he just can’t get it all out. Weeks later, he runs into a burning chicken coop and comes out with his pants cuffs aflame — right in the places he soaked in the most butter as he trudged around the calf-deep muck on the CSW lawns. 

Every fire department that responds ultimately decides they have to trash most of their gear. It’s not worth the trouble and expense of cleaning it. They have to replace not just coats and pants, but hoses and nozzles — and at least one car. Duane's boss swears up and down that the corrosive salt in the butter rusted out the bottom of his city-issued Chevy over the course of several months. 

Duane and many folks on his team have to throw out their personal clothes as well. A spill management specialist with the state Department of Natural Resources, who arrives on Monday to take over parts of the cleanup process, decides he’ll “wear the same smelly clothes to the site, day in and day out … and change at the office” to limit his losses. 

Summer, 1991
Madison, Wisconsin

There is no clean end to the Great Butter Fire. Small firefighter crews remain on site for eight days, putting out the occasional spurt of flame simmering under rubble as cleanup crews and investigators comb the ruins. 

The bystanders stick around for a few days as well, but they are never quite so numerous as that first evening. By the second afternoon, they are really just a small and passing crowd on the sidewalk — fewer disaster-hungry gawkers and more casually curious folks who saw the blaze on the news, were clearly bored on the weekend, and figured they might as well check out the aftermath for a minute.

Only some of the first responders get called back over the following days and weeks, even though many, like Patrick, assumed they'd have to return, given the scale of the mess. High command knows they're burned out. This suits Terry just fine. More overtime would have been nice, but now he can finally turn to his window cleaning side hustle, and a softball tournament set for the weekend. 

Duane comes back every day for over a week, though, of his own volition, determined to clean the ponds he created. It takes some trial and error, but his crew realizes that once they’ve drained out all the water from below, they’re left with gobs of semi-solid grease. They use excavators to scoop up most of it, then pour 168,000 pounds of sand over the slippery surfaces, again and again, to soak and scrape up the remainder, finally power washing the roads, hydrants, trees, and so on. 

Once that solution's worked out, Duane's on to the next crisis. He thinks briefly about turning his own footage of the fire into a training video. (He's not sure why, but he documents every crisis he responds to in detail, for his own record and reference.) But he's far more focused on other projects, like his efforts to develop a new textured surface for sidewalk curbs that'll better alert the visually impaired that they're approaching a road. He'll go on to file several patents for these designs, and briefly start his own business. Still, when he retires in 1999, his boss gives him an award that commemorates his service at the Butter Fire. To Duane, it was just another problem solved. To his boss, it was the finest example of his skill for quick, decisive action. 

After Duane's gone, his crews stay on site for about a month to execute his solutions. And a state Department of Natural Resources spills expert, who arrives a couple days after the fire to assist, sticks around all summer, coordinating the slow process of scooping up the piles of meat, cheese, produce, and rubble left to rot in the sun. He has to work fast, because while the sludge already smells obscene he knows the longer he waits the more insects, rats, and raccoons will descend on the site. But the trash is too slick with butter residue to dive right into the center with an excavator, so he has to tackle it slowly, like a tar spill, working in gradually from the edges. Even after he leaves, the city struggles to get anything to grow in the butter-salted earth for months, if not years. 

The legal battles take even longer, only resolving the last question of culpability in 1996. 

Many of the first responders refuse to call this a success story. “The fire was too massive for us to control… the volume was mind-boggling,” one argues. “It was a lost cause from the get-go.” 

“You hate to say it,” Fred admits, “but luck enters in when you deal with something that big.” 

Some even argue the response was wrong-headed, that they should never have tried to put out that first flare-up. Their water just pushed around fuel. It'd have been better to let it burn itself out. And if they were going to respond, they should have used suppressive foam, not water.

Despite all of the chaos, there’s a reason you’ve probably never heard this story if you didn't grow up in Madison: We devote our attention to disasters suffered, not disasters averted. 

And this disaster certainly never broke as bad as it could have. At most, six people suffered minor burns, banged knees, or over-exhaustion, despite the fact that dozens truly could have died. The worst injury actually came during the cleanup, when an excavator hauling out a steel beam turned too quickly and dinged an investigator right in the work helmet, sending him to the hospital for rest and observation. 

Passers-by still retched at the lingering stench of rotting cranberries and rancid fats for weeks to come. Some pregnant women say they held their breath every time they passed by, even in a car, and some of the neighborhood kids rechristened CSW "the stinky place" even after the smell faded. But at most, a couple of bystanders caught a whiff of caustic ammonia escaping shut-down pipes, despite the fact that there was enough on site to cause a major explosion. And at worst, a couple of chunks of butter goo made it into the creek and got scooped up a block downstream, despite the risk of a citywide environmental disaster. 

The mass destruction of gear opened an opportunity for upgrades. Scott finally got a suit that fit, and Madison switched from cotton canvas hoses to more durable synthetic materials.

Station 5 actually got a deep clean and a paint job out of the deal, although most of the guys I’ve spoken to insist it still stank on hot days for at least a decade. 

Even CSW weathered the disaster remarkably well. They rebuilt one of the destroyed freezer warehouses within months to reassure their remaining clients, and found new work for everyone affected by the fire rather than letting them go. All that two years before they finally got an insurance payout, and well before they knew if their clients would stick with them. A few pulled out, but many local farms, as well as the Ocean Spray cranberry team, stuck with the long-trusted family business.

No one felt the loss of that butter either. At the time, the government was sitting on over 500 million pounds of the stuff. Some of it was earmarked for food assistance programs, budget resale, use at government facilities, or international export and aid — but none of the bricks and sticks at the CSW facility were earmarked for a specific use. A federal court found that, under the letter of the law, the forklift manufacturer owed the feds a ton of cash for the loss. However, a seemingly grumpy dissenting judge opined that “accidental destruction by someone who has to pay top dollar seems to be the best thing that could have happened to this butter.”

Fred adamantly refuses to take any credit for that success. All he did, he insists, was his job. He protected his people, and made one or two good (but he believes very straightforward) calls. In fact, he's a little baffled when people, like CSW's old executives, treat him like a hero. They've tried to invite him to social functions over the years, to celebrate him. He remains impassive. 

For Jeff, ever curious, the fire became a point of personal fascination. In 1992, the fire investigation team tapped him to join them. He's still not sure why. Best guess: They saw him as a dependable, resourceful guy — or as he puts it, "the person likely to do the least amount of damage." Jeff spent years learning about the science of fire, about how and why this or that might burn. He read the Butter FIre investigation reports, attended parts of the civil trials it sparked, and picked the brains of that investigator he met in the alley over the occasional coffee or beer.

Eventually, Jeff learned that he was right: Sprinklers were the answer. The only thing, he now believes, that could have stopped that fire was a gold-standard in-rack system. 

Patrick first and foremost developed a healthy fear of lactic fires. Months after his big trip to Madison, he and another Butter Fire vet responded to a blaze at a small dairy just outside of Mount Horeb. Another crew beat them there, but that team was struggling with a faulty hose — while a line of flame crept ever closer to a rack of Christmas gift packs of little cheeses. Patrick and his companion sprung into action, grabbing every fire extinguisher they could to keep the fire back, away from the dairy, until the other crew got their hose working. They weren't going to live through that mess again if they could help it. 

But, ever the farkle, Patrick also tracked down every news story and incident report he could find on the fire. He even acquired a training video created by a niche firefighting education network, using footage gathered from bystanders. Puzzling over the fire, asking the right questions, helped him realize that he couldn't just think about the type of building he was walking into, or its contents in isolation. He now views conflagrations as holistic crises, and considers how each component will flow into every other factor during an incident. 

Just as he never got to run into the heart of the fire, Patrick also never really got a chance to talk to and build bridges with the Madison firefighters. But a few years down the line, with a little more experience and maturity under his belt, Patrick decided to pursue firefighting full-time, and set his sights on a career with the MFD. It took longer than he might've liked to make the cut — seven applications over 14 years. But when he finally made it to a final-round interview in 2010, he was able to say, "Hey, we've worked together already. I was at the Butter Fire!" 

Scott underwent perhaps the most profound transformation. His experience of community and camaraderie at Station 5 planted a seed in his mind — a realization that firefighting might be the positive purpose he'd been looking for all this time. It scratches his itch, to figure out how things work and haul around some seriously cool gear. And it does so in a way that helps others, rather than endangering his own life. 

Like Patrick, he later joined the Madison Fire Department, eventually becoming an inspector, sussing out how and why things burn the way they do — and how to mitigate those risks. He also trains new recruits, sharing his own story as a reformed problem child who found purpose in fighting fires. 

He doesn't always mention that he found that purpose while drenched in butter water, watching a room of punch-drunk firefighters wolf down homemade cookies, cassaroles, and perhaps some purloined pork — that he found meaning in one of the most patently absurd incidents in firefighting history. 

But the true legacy of this disaster averted, was solidarity. Long-standing tensions between rural guys like Patrick and Scott and city pros like Fred and Jeff began to ease in the aftermath, tempered by a shared, trust-forging ordeal. And firefighters across the board gained a newfound appreciation for their surrounding communities — the neighbors who showed up, stood by them, and helped carry them through the long, dark, and greasy fight. 

The guy who fell into the man-sized hole on the lawn, for example, took six months to rebuild his relationship with butter. For a time, the mere smell of the stuff reminded him of the experience. He says he's still off of hotdogs to this day. But while the ordeal eventually faded into something he can laugh about, something deeper stuck: he still donates to the Salvation Army. Those cups of coffee — those small acts of care and moments of normalcy — meant everything to him after a day spent battling the butter. 

They were just a few older guys, giving their time and their money without expecting anything in return. That's who he hopes to be in his golden years, for the next sap who falls down a butter hole. 

Thanks to Dwight Williams, Donald Shillinglaw, Ed Ruckriegel, Jeff Miller, Jim Cerro, Gordon Berggren, Larry Acker, Michael Dibble, Mikey Fuss, Phil Vorlander, Rick Willauer, Roger Bagneski, Tommy Anderson, and all the other current and former members of the Madison Fire Department who spoke to Switchboard for this story.

Thanks as well to then-reporters Jonnel Licari and Mike Flaherty, city engineer Larry Nelson, dispatcher Linda Palmer, former CJ’s waitress Michele Jabs, current head of CSW Sam Krieg, state spills specialist Ted Amman, and commodities fire expert Glenn Corbett for their invaluable insights and assistance.

Mark Hay is a Brooklyn based freelance reporter who's covered food science, culture, and history for outlets like Atlas Obscura, Serious Eats, and VICE.