El Dorado firefighters on Wednesday responded to a house fire in the 200 block of Mimosa Drive, and managed to extinguish the blaze before it escaped the room it started in.
"The fire started in the bedroom. We couldn't really determine what the point of origin was, or what the source was, but it did start in the bedroom," El Dorado Fire Chief Chad Mosby said.
Multiple children and an adult woman were at the home when the fire started. Mosby said by the time firefighters arrived, the children were waiting outside. No one was injured.
"It was confined to the room of origin; just room contents damage," Mosby said.
Mosby said how severe a fire is largely depends on how quickly the fire department is notified about it.
"For instance, if somebody is at work and they don't have a fire alarm system in their house, it's going to rely on somebody driving by, seeing heavy smoke coming out and calling us; by that time, the first could have grown throughout the structure," he said.
How quickly a fire spreads also depends on what materials are in the house and what it's constructed out of as well.
"It's not uncommon for us to run on room content fires, or things where it's not extended through the structure, but it's also not uncommon that when we get to fires, too, that the fire could have grown through the structure," Mosby said.
Just last week, the El Dorado Fire Department marked National Fire Prevention Week, visiting area schools to spread awareness about fire safety, giving tours of the Central Station to local students and demonstrating some of their firefighting equipment.
This morning, the Arkansas Department of Agriculture's Forestry Division began a prescribed burn in Union County, on Highway 7 Northwest in the Junction City area. The burn was scheduled to continue through until midnight Friday. Amy Lyman, director of communications for the Department of Agriculture, said a prescribed burn was also performed near El Dorado on Thursday.
According to the Forestry Division, Union County is currently at "moderate" risk of wildfires. A burn ban is not currently in place in Union County; the U.S. Forest Service says moderate risk means that wildfires can be started by accident fairly easily, but the number of wildfires is generally low.
Prescribed burning is "often conducted to prepare the seedbed for mechanical, hand-planted or natural regeneration of seedlings," according to the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture.
"The temperatures are nice and more and more people are wanting to get outside and do some outdoor burning, but then again, we always want you to be real careful when you do that," Mosby said last week. "We emphasize fire prevention in October, but everybody really need to practice fire prevention methods and concepts every day of the year."