Hay truck catches fire on Highway 62 while passing through Morongo Valley

On Thursday at 2:07 p.m. on the corner of Senilis and Highway 62 in Morongo Valley, a cargo truck hauling bales of hay was reported on fire heading east, closing both eastbound lanes. Eyewitness photos show the fire starting towards the front of the trailer by the cab before it engulfed the whole load and the interior of the cab. 

By the time owner of Just a Small-Town Grill Jim Ragland saw the truck go by his restaurant, it was completely in flames.

“It was on fire when it came across in front of the restaurant; some of the people in the restaurant saw it. After talking to the driver, he knew that he was trying to slow down, so the place where he actually stopped was near the Chevron station where he could safely pull over. The driver is fine, he got out okay, though the truck is obviously a total loss,” said Ragland.

Ragland said the Morongo Valley Fire Department was on the scene within 3-4 minutes, followed by Riverside County Fire approximately twenty minutes after. While Morongo Fire successfully extinguished the blaze, Ragland said he has seen cargo trucks hauling hay catch fire multiple times before, and that “once they catch fire, there’s no stopping it.”

“It was a set of doubles, so two trailers and the first trailer was fully engulfed while they were putting water on it, the second one just went up and was gone in minutes… I was talking to the driver about it, and we think the hay might have been stacked too close to the exhaust stack in the truck, so that’s sort of what the feeling is,” said Ragland

While it was too soon for official details from Morongo Valley Fire, Assistant Fire Chief Daniel Casner affirmed how fast these hay trucks go up in flames and how difficult they can be to put out and clean up: 

“It’s always pretty nasty because anytime hay starts on fire it takes forever to put out. I can only imagine what Highway 62 looks like. When I worked on the 10 freeway, anytime that we’d have a hay fire, we were looking at about four, five/six hours’ worth of cleanup, just because you have to break down every one of those bales of hay, get water on it, put it out. It’s a smoky, dirty mess and I can only imagine that’s what the boys are doing up there right now,” said Casner. 

Traffic remained delayed until the fire was fully extinguished, well after 6:00 p.m.