A fire on June 27, 1943 that was caused by the heating of U.S. Army munitions aboard a freight train during World War II.
Raymond Edward Myers was a carman who worked for the D&RG. According to Myers, he was sent by the railroad to Rifle to repair a car on a West-bound ammunition train that day. He did so, and he and the crew rode the train to Grand Junction. Just past De Beque, the crew noticed a hotbox (an overheated axle) in a car in the middle of the train. The crew stopped the train and separated the engine in order to repair the car. Myers only had a few minutes to repack the hotbox before the next train came along. He did so, with others helping him in his work. The car was thought fixed.
According to railroad employee Frank Chiaro, when the train arrived in Grand Junction, some of the crew of the train went into the Beanery, a restaurant at the depot (Chiaro was not at the depot at this time, and so would have heard this information second hand). It was then that the hot box caught fire, and flames spread to the floor of the car.
Myers stayed behind and walked from the caboose up to where the problem car was located, past approximately 40 cars. He saw that the inside of the car was in flames. He ran to the yard office to get a fire extinguisher. While he was in the office, the car blew up. He went out to find that two cars had been pulled forward to around Main Street, while the rest of the ammunition train had been pulled back to the new yard, about two miles east.
According to oral history interviewee Frank Chiaro, who lived on Lawrence Avenue near the depot at the time of the accident, the fire happened around 2 am. Shells began to explode, and to shoot up over the western part of downtown. Chiaro and his sister Mary (Chiaro) Colosimo, who was also interviewed, both remembered waking up in terror and thinking they were under attack. Chiaro and his wife ran to the back of their brick house, where they sheltered from what they believed was an attack for the duration of the night. They could see shells streaking overhead and hear constant explosions. Towards dawn, he said, the explosion of shells came more infrequently. US Army engineers from Colorado Springs were brought in to destroy the bombs. They constructed a “trap” to dispose of the munitions. Residents reported where bombs had been found, and others brought the bombs to the Army. Fire chief Charles Downing lost his arm in the explosions. Victor Griffith, a switchman, was able to separate the rest of the train from the three cars that were burning, and take that part of the train all the way back to the section of track along the Gunnison River, below the Orchard Mesa cemetery. He was commended for his bravery and promoted.
The fire nearly burned down the Biggs-Kurtz lumber warehouse. It was saved from destruction only by an unknown soldier (who, according to Josephine Biggs, was "drunk as a lord"). No one could grab the fire hose and get close enough to the fire with all of the explosions, but he appeared from nowhere, grabbed the hose, and got close enough to the building to wet everything down.
