ADAMS, Tenn. (WTVF) — In the small town of Adams, Tennessee, a small fire department stays ready if they ever get a call.
"Yes, I am a department of one," said Chief Donovan Tucker of the Adams Fire Department.
The rest of the department's manpower is all volunteer. Sometimes that can be tricky to navigate, but especially right now, during tobacco curing season.
"It’s very tricky, but fortunately we have had enough [volunteers] come in," said Tucker.
At one point, the city of Adams and the surrounding area was considered the dark-fired tobacco capital of the world. Dark-fired tobacco is used primarily for cigars, pipe, and chewing tobacco. In fact, in nearby Clarksville, the state's oldest newspaper The Leaf-Chronicle was named for the bumper crop. The distinct smell of a curing tobacco barn has become a beloved tradition in the area.
Curing tobacco is a delicate art. Eighth-generation tobacco farmer, Timothy Head, showed me how it works back in 2022. A smoldering fire has to stay going around the clock for nearly a month to give the leaves the perfect cure. But changes out of the farmer's control can make something routine suddenly become risky.
"The winds were up pretty good Sunday morning," said Tucker. "With the dry conditions that’s been going on, the leaves and stuff, it makes it really scary."
Sure enough on Sunday morning, Chief Tucker got one of those calls. A tobacco barn caught fire. Tucker believes the wind shifted either tobacco to fall into the flames or for the flames to catch the structure on fire.
"I had to move the truck several times just to find an area safe enough to set up the truck. The heat was so intense," Chief Tucker said.
Tucker had eight volunteers show up, but the flames, already shooting through the roof by the time they arrived, were just too much. The barn and everything inside were a total loss.
"This was a huge barn, it had like nine acres of tobacco in it," Chief Tucker said. "Estimated loss of that was $238,000. Huge loss."
This was the second barn to catch fire in a matter of days. It was the third fire this tobacco season in Adams. "All three have been wind-related," he said.
It comes at a challenging time for the industry. According to the USDA Ag Census, there were 22,953 tobacco farms in 1992. In 2022, that plummeted to just 241 tobacco farms statewide.
Any tobacco barn fire is heartbreaking to Chief Tucker.
"I mean they worked hard all summer, and then they get ready to make their money back and they just lost it all in a couple hours," he said.
But he thinks, even if he had a much larger fire department, it's a battle that's hard to win. "Because once it breaks out, it spreads," Chief Tucker said.
Do you have more information about this story? You can email me at Chris.Davis@newschannel5.com.
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-Rebecca Schleicher
