Warbird Information Exchange

Fire destroys Sgt. Bluff bus barn
8:15 AM

A fire early Tuesday destroyed approximately 11 school buses belonging to the Sergeant Bluff-Luton School District.

The fire in the district's bus barn about a mile outside Sergeant Bluff was reported around 1 a.m.

There was no immediate word on the cause of the fire, and the state fire marshal's office was investigating.

The district was asking parents to car pool their children to school on Tuesday.

Several area fire departments were on the scene, and water had to be hauled in to fight the fire.

Also, it is reported that several airplanes owned by the Air Museum were destroyed.

Air museum loses fire truck, planes in bus barn fire
2:45 PM
By Lynn Zerschling Journal staff writer

Not only school buses burned up in the fire at the Sergeant Bluff-Luton bus barn fire early Tuesday morning. An historic fire truck and planes did as well.

The Mid America Transportation and Aviation Museum had stored a number of items in the school bus barn.

"We lost an old fire truck that belonged to the Sioux City Public Museum," Maurey Topf, transportation museum president and director, said Tuesday. "We had a Thorpe T18 airplane that was worth $100,000 when it was flying, It was a very high efficiency, cross country airplane. You could fly around the world in it."

A home-built airplane from Cleveland, Ohio, was destroyed, along with two ultra-lights and two hang gliders. The fire also destroyed a jet engine from an A-7D, which the Air Guard used to fly out of Sioux City Air Base.

"It's pretty upsetting," Topf stated. "I feel so bad. These are irreplaceable."

Steve Hansen, director of the Public Museum, said the 1941 Mack truck once was used by the Sioux City Fire Department.

"We had anticipated displaying that in our new site," he said of the former JCPenney's building downtown. "We planned on having that as a hands-on truck for kids."

The museum also had loaned the air museum the Thorpe T18.

"We had planned to suspend that from the ceiling," Hansen said. "It was a cute little plane that was donated to us in 1987. It was made from a kit."

After visiting the bus barn, he said, "All you can see of the fire truck is the shell. The plane must have been vaporized."

Hansen said the museum only has three larger pieces stored off-site and not in the Peirce Mansion or Pearl Street Research Center.

"Those were two of them. We thought it was a safe space," he said. "From our standpoint, it's not the monetary value that is important. It's the historic value of that truck."

Topf said the artifacts were not insured.

"We sought companies three different times to insure these things, but we couldn't find insurance. They didn't want to insure them because they were irreplaceable. If they did, they wanted really high premiums that we couldn't afford."

The air museum has items stored in three other warehouses.

"We still have a lot of stuff to put in our museum," he said.

Last year, the Sioux City City Council approved a 40-year lease with the museum to lease land near Sioux Gateway Airport. The museum will be built in phases over seven years on 15 acres of land located northeast of the airport at Expedition Court.