A garbage truck caught fire on Monday in Abingdon and required emergency response from Abingdon Fire Company personnel.

Firefighters were grabbing lunch at a Wawa four minutes away when they received an alert around noon about a trash fire at the intersection of Route 924 and Singer Road. Their meals had to be cut short, as they spent the next hour soaking a large pile of trash in the Beverage Barn Liquors parking lot, according to company chief Cubby Blair.

“There was not a lot of fire, just a lot of wetting down what was on the ground,” Bair said.

Bair said that when the driver noticed a fire had ignited in the back of his garbage truck, he promptly pulled into the Beverage Barn parking lot and dumped his load of trash onto the pavement. Eight Abingdon Fire Co. personnel arrived in two engines, Rescue Engine 4 and Engine 412, to extinguish the flames.

The truck itself never caught fire, only the trash inside, and there “was no way of determining the cause,” according to Bair. “I would however remind people to discard batteries properly.”

The fire did not spread from the pile and had no impact on surrounding traffic, Bair said. An employee of Beverage Barn Liquors, who asked not to be named, described the fire as “not a big deal,” noting that it did not pose a threat to the building.

Bair could not recall which waste disposal company was involved but said a cleanup crew arrived to collect the remaining trash.

At 2:45 p.m. Monday afternoon, Abingdon Fire Co. shared the incident on its Facebook page and received over 100 likes on the post.

“We passed it … driver looked overwhelmed,” wrote Sue Wagner-Thornton.

“Smart thinking on the drivers part,” user Ryan Chapman said.

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