By Jessica Selby

This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

An oven caught fire, a pellet stove malfunctioned and the smell of gas seeped into the Cumberland Farms of Washington Street keeping West Warwick firefighters busy this weekend.

Fire Fighters were dispatched to the Cumberland Farms on Washington Street in West Warwick on Saturday at 4:24 p.m. on the 15^th because there was a report of a strong odor of gas in the building according to West Warwick Fire Chief Joseph Baris.

The gas pumps were turned off, the employees and customers were vacated from the building and the lights were shut down, but it turned out to be “minor” in nature and only done as a “precautionary measure,” Baris said.

“There are some electrical conduit pipes that run underground to the main building and it appears that they were not capped at the end so because of all the rain the fumes were getting through to the main building and the people inside could smell the gas,” Baris said.  “As I understand it was minor in nature, but the store was temporarily shut down as a precautionary measure until they could get one of their maintenance guys down there to fix the problem.”

Baris said that once the maintenance man arrived he capped the pipes that were causing the problem and the store was reopened. According to a representative at the store, it was nearly eight hours that the store had to be closed because of the incident.

On Friday West Warwick firefighters also responded to two incidents in town.  There was an oven fire at 7:25 a.m. on Turner Drive and a pellet stove malfunction later that day at 3:30 p.m. on Michael Street.

Both incidents, Baris said, could have been much worse in nature had the home owners not been home at that the time that the fires broke out, but were both relatively contained because of their quick response time, he said.

What happened in the case of the oven fire, Baris said, is that the homeowner had attempted to use the self cleaning option on their home oven, but fire broke ignited inside the shell of the oven.

“When you use the self clean on your oven, you have to first clean out the run off from things that you have cooked in their and in this case the person did not and she had flames coming out of the door of the oven,” Baris said.

Baris said that fire fighters responded and the fire was contained to the oven with little to no damage elsewhere in the house.

At 3:30 p.m. they were dispatched to Michael Street for a report of a pellet stove fire.  Baris said that when crews arrived the house was full of smoke.  He said that it appears that the homeowner may have overloaded the stove with pellets because the storage compartment on the stove which holds the extra pellets that feed the main stove had caught fire and backed up sending flames and heavy smoke back into the house.

Again the homeowner was home and was able to notify emergency crews.  Baris said that he doesn’t believe there was any other major fire damage to the house except to the stove, although he said there was some smoke damage.

Baris said that there was also a chimney fire on Sunday the 16^th at 5:30 p.m. and that the department has had to respond to “quite a few CO detector calls” lately.

He said that although the cost for home heating oil has come down slightly that some people are still trying to come up with creative alternative means for heating their homes and this often times can lead to trouble.  Baris said that he has seen people using their ovens to heat their homes, which he said can be “very dangerous.”  He said that people also need to have their home heating equipment properly cleaned and serviced to prevent chimney fires and furnace combustions.