By Hal Dardick and Jason Meisner
The Chicago Tribune
WILL COUNTY, Ill. — A fire on the roof of the Will County Jail in Joliet triggered a lockdown Wednesday morning, but the blaze was quickly extinguished and no one was injured, a jail spokesman said.
Two workmen were using blow torches to remove a cooling tower atop a third-floor roof shortly after 8 a.m. when the tower ignited, said Pat Barry, spokesman for the Will County Sheriff’s Department.
“It’s just like a Christmas tree, it went up,” said Barry, adding that firefighters extinguished the blaze by 8:20 a.m. “The way these things are built, it’s like a huge garbage can. It goes straight up. ... It looks a lot worse than it is.”
Jail personnel, who practice fire drills once a month, put inmates on lockdown, the first step in the evacuation plan, but nobody was removed, Barry said.
At about 9:45 a.m., the jail remained on lockdown while employees checked the condition of the facility. At that point, no internal damage had been discovered, Barry said.
The jail, at 95 S. Chicago St., is undergoing a $67 million expansion.
On Oct. 9, two workers pouring a concrete floor fell nearly 30 feet when a steel structure collapsed beneath them. One sustained a broken leg and the other a broken pelvis.
Copyright 2007 Chicago Tribune