A fire fanned by strong winds destroyed a school bus and heavily damaged two others in New Minas Saturday morning.
The fire started in a row of buses parked behind the Irving Big Stop, just off Highway 101, shortly before 10 a.m.
Only one bus was burning when New Minas fire chief Jim Redmond arrived on the scene, but the winds pushed the flames into one adjacent bus and then another as thick smoke billowed into the sky.
Firefighters used a turret similar to those on airport firefighting trucks to knock down the bulk of the fire in the first bus that was burning, before using hose lines to extinguish the rest of the flames.
The three buses were at the end of the row of 12 vehicles. Redmond said it was fortunate the wind wasn’t blowing in the opposite direction.
The cause of the fire is under investigation. Three extension cords led from a power source on a nearby pole to the three buses that burned, but Redmond said it’s too early to say what the cause was.
There were no injuries.