Fire at Creal Springs Municipal Building under investigation, city deals with damage

CREAL SPRINGS, Ill. (KFVS) - An investigation is ongoing in the city of Creal Springs, in Williamson County, after a fire started in the city’s municipal building Monday night, August 8.

Creal Springs Mayor Micah Morrow said she received a call around 5:48 p.m. that the municipal building, which contains multiple agencies like the police department and city offices, was on fire.

Morrow believes it started in a storage attic.

No one was hurt and none of the city’s equipment was damaged, but the offices did have some water damage.

“It’s overwhelming, it’s overwhelming. It’s going to take a lot to get it all back together,” said Morrow.

Just before 6 p.m. Monday, Morrow received a call from the Chief of Police that the Municipal Building was on fire.

The Williamson County Fire Protection Chief Jeremy Norris said 37 firefighters from multiple agencies responded.

“There’s a lot of damage where the fire was, but in the office area of their city hall, all that stuff should be fine, just some smoke damage, maybe a little water damage. Hopefully all of their records will be salvaged,” said Norris.

Norris said the building was on fire for around 35 minutes.

“The problem was the access, it was in a confined area, storage space up above, the floor trusses started getting bad on us so they couldn’t get in there, so they saw when we finally opened the roof up and we could get on top of it, start dumping water down,” Norris said.

Morrow said the city is already moving things over to another building to get back to work.

“It’ll slow us down for a couple of days, but we have set up, we own sugar creek downtown, so we are going to move city hall down to sugar creek. So we should have a few days without phone service or internet, we’ve called all of that today to get all of that moved down there so we can set up and start running normal,” Morrow said.

Morrow says the building was insured.

She said she is not sure of when it will be rebuilt.

City crews will be back working at the Sugar Creek location by Wednesday.

The departments responding included the Williamson County Fire Protection District and the City of Marion Fire Department.

The State Fire Marshal arrived on the scene Monday night and is investigating.

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