It took four fire departments over five hours to put out a garage fire in Washington Township on Monday afternoon.

At 3:30 p.m., Dwayne Henritzy, township fire marshal and Friedens assistant fire chief, arrived at Hanna’s Auto and Truck Recycling on Best Station Road and immediately called for help.“There were a lot of explosions,” he said.“I was the first one on the scene and it was exploding. Everything I could see was on fire, tires were flying though the air,” he said.According to Henritzy no one was injured in the blaze but the building is, “a total loss.”The hardest work for the departments called in, Slatedale, Neffs, Friedens and one tanker from Slatington, was finding enough water to put out the fire.“The amount of fire and the question of how to get the water to the rural community was a challenge,” he said.“We worked with the county tanker task force. We got 70,000 gallons out of a pond and Emerald offered one of their hydrants. We went through anywhere from 50 to 90,000 gallons of water.”Henritzy ruled the blaze accidental saying, “It was human error. Two guys were getting ready to load a car into the crusher, there was spilled fuel on the floor and a spark caught the fuel, there was a lot of fuel in the building,” he said.“Once the fire reached the sprayed polyurethane insulation it was gone,” he said.Neighbor Larry Eckert also noted the lack of water. He said his wife saw smoke coming from the junkyard, so he grabbed his camera and walked up the road.When he arrived, some of the building was already engulfed in flames.A former firefighter in New York state, Eckert noted that there are no fire hydrants on the street.He said that tankers ferried water back and forth to the fire, but the response was delayed by a lack of water.“I was bewildered there was no water pressure,” he said. “It took me maybe 12-15 minutes to walk up there. The fire company had been up there, but there was no water.”The departments worked from 3:30 to 8:15 p.m. Monday night and returned to the scene early Tuesday morning to extinguish the smoldering remains of the fire.Chris Reber contributed to this report.