Duluth firefighters contain Altec fire, respond to church blaze

Duluth firefighters were pulled to two structure fires at once on Wednesday, May 20, testing the city’s response across an industrial site on Port Terminal Drive and a church on East Eighth Street. The larger of the two, at Altec’s facility at 1255 Port Terminal Drive, was reported in the building’s air filtration system, while crews were also sent to Trinity Lutheran Church, where a small electrical fire had started in a wall.

At Altec, employees used extinguishers to hold the fire down before firefighters from Lincoln Park and downtown headquarters arrived at about 11:35 a.m. Staff members evacuated on their own and completed a head count, a fast response that helped keep the incident from turning into a more serious workplace emergency. Because the building was large, the fire department sent a second alarm as a precaution, but crews kept the blaze confined to the air filtration unit and knocked it down with a single line.

The Altec fire forced production to stop for a few hours before resuming later that same afternoon, a brief shutdown that still carried real costs for a facility tied to Duluth’s waterfront industrial corridor. The fire department estimated damage at $50,000 to $75,000. Altec’s Duluth operations serve electric utility, telecommunications, tree care, lights and signs, and contractor markets, and the company says it has been in business since 1929.

The incident also showed how much local emergency coverage can be stretched when two fires break out nearly simultaneously. In addition to Lincoln Park and downtown headquarters, the department credited stations from Spirit Valley, Duluth Heights, Morgan Park/Gary-New Duluth, Woodland and Lakeside, along with Saint Louis County 911 Dispatch and Duluth Police, for helping manage the day’s calls. The fire was logged as case 26005890 in the department’s records.

At Trinity Lutheran Church, located at 1108 E. 8th St., firefighters found an electrical outlet with a small fire in the wall and extinguished it quickly. Damage there was described as minimal. No one was injured in either fire, but the day underscored how quickly a routine workday or worship service can become a public-safety problem when fire hits both an industrial site and a neighborhood church at the same time.