A story in the July 5 Leaf Chronicle, the newspaper of Clarksville and Fort Campbell, Tenn., gave new meaning to the term “hot load,” oft used by dispatchers to the chagrin of truck drivers certain to be waiting in line outside a shipper’s facility in the near future. As intrepid Leaf reporter Ann Wallace wrote, a Montgomery County Sherriff’s Department deputy happened to take note of a truck driver’s load of timber on state highway 48/13. Timber’s pretty garden variety for the region, but this particular “load’s white oak timber was burning…the wind feeding the flames,” Wallace wrote.

The deputy, who used his sirens and lights to alert the unsuspecting trucker to the hot problem on his trailer, reportedly used an extinguisher to tamp down the rolling forest fire before the fire department arrived to finish the job.