February 10, 2016 - The Joaquin Volunteer Fire Department (JVFD) and DeSoto Parish Fire District 1 fought a house fire near the Joaquin city square at 10:26am on Wednesday, February 10, 2016.
According to firemen at the scene, Dennis Leggett waved down JVFD fireman Steve Cockrell and alerted him the house was on fire located behind the Texas State Bank just off the Joaquin square. Cockrell moved quickly to the JVFD and drove a tanker truck to the scene of the fire on U.S. Highway 84 at the intersection of Jackson Street.
Cockrell contacted the Shelby County Sheriff's Department to alert additional units while he and a city employee began extinguishing flames. As Joaquin firemen arrived on scene, so did DeSoto Parish firemen due to an automatic response mutual aid agreement between the two departments. Firemen from both departments entered the home and were able to put down the fire and prevent a total loss of the house owned by Travis Rodgers.
3/4 of the house received major damage from the fire. Richard Woolf, the renter of the house, was not home at the time. The cause of the fire was suspected to have been a space heater, but could not be absolutely determined at the time the firemen were on scene. The fire remains under investigation. The firemen returned to the station at 11:19am.
An automatic mutual aid agreement means when a fire department is dispatched to a structure fire, other departments within the agreement will respond to assist them without first being paged out by a dispatcher.
