A fire in the parking lot of a Scio Township truck stop resulted in an impromptu barbecue Sunday evening when one rig’s flames roasted frozen beef in a nearby trailer.

Adam Rodriguez and Edgar Chavez of El Paso, Texas, had just refueled their A&A Logistics tractor-trailer and backed into a parking space at the western edge of the Pilot Travel Center, 195 Baker Road, when a fire broke out. It started in the engine compartment of their Kenworth T2000, which was bringing a load of computers to Romulus.

The father-son team escaped and tried to douse the blaze with a small extinguisher, but flames soon spread to the saddle-type fuel tanks, then to a nearby trailer loaded with 42,000 pounds of beef.

“I’m just glad it wasn’t my fault,” said Janeen Bradshaw, the 32-year-old driver of the Tranx Limited rig. “It was my truck that got caught in the aftermath.”

She was hauling the meat from Liberal, Kansas, to Mississauga, Ontario.

“One of the cops tried to find me, but I was inside (the truck stop),” Bradshaw said. “He saved my truck, actually. He was very brave.”

Washtenaw County Sheriff’s Deputy Keith Mansell—who smashed the driver’s window of the truck—wore a gauze bandage on his right hand as he inspected the charred remains at the scene.

Firefighters from Scio Township, Dexter, and Chelsea quickly responded to the call and extinguished the flames with about 10 gallons of foam, said Scio Township Fire Chief Carl Ferch. Excess fuel ran into cisterns at the truck stop.

“Some of the older ones don’t have that feature, but this one was built with it,” Ferch said.

A new-car transporter carrying General Motors SUVs was parked next to the burned trailer, but was not damaged.

Sarah Rapai, manager of the truck stop, said diesel fuel pumps were shut down for about two hours after the fire.

The incident also disrupted plans for many truckers whose rigs weren’t directly affected but were parked at the facility. Deborah Lee of Arlington, Texas, was delivering a load of auto parts to a factory in Centerline.

“I was in the shower when all this took place,” Lee said.

She had driven for 11 hours and was required to rest for 10 hours before dropping her load at 5 a.m. She said she called her supervisors at J.B. Hunt about the delay.

Rodriguez said his laptop computer and two cell phones were consumed when the truck went up in flames. On Monday, he said he and his son would fly home to El Paso with only the clothes on their back.

At 11:45 p.m. Sunday, Grant’s Towing was still waiting for a Michigan Department of Environmental Quality official to arrive at the scene and advise about disposal. An excavator and a skid loader had been requested.

“I’m sure that the environmental people will take it from there,” said Kimberly Marshke of Grant’s Towing.

Dan Schnaidt, night tow driver for Grant’s, said he’d handled bad accidents before, but nothing “in a burn sense to this magnitude.” At least five and maybe seven workers would be loading the damaged goods onto a dump truck or a flat bed for landfill disposal, he said.