Residents in Derby said they are grateful for the firefighters who responded to a large building fire Thursday night. It happened in the 300 block of South Water around 9:00 p.m. The Derby Fire Department, Wichita Fire Department, Sedgwick County Fire Department, Mulvane Fire Department, McConnell Air Force Base and Sedgwick County EMS all responded to the scene.
“First arriving crews were met with heavy fire from the top of the building,” said Jonathan Marr, Derby Fire Marshal. “Fire was showing through the roof.” Multiple neighbors reported hearing a loud explosion, with one saying that it shook his house. “We thought it was a sonic boom, at first,” said Russell Jensen, who lives nearby.
Jensen has lived in Derby since 1980, and said that this was not the first time the building, an old plastics factory, has caught fire. “The wife went into the bathroom, and she was hearing a lot of funny popping noises, and thought it was fireworks, sounded like fireworks in the distance,” Jensen said. “So, I went in there and yeah, you could hear it.”
Fire crews attempted to tackle the fire from inside the building, but were forced to go defensive, meaning they could only fight it from the outside.
