A city of Statesboro natural gas sanitation truck caught fire in Statesboro Monday afternoon, forcing the closing of the central downtown area for more than 90 minutes.

Statesboro Fire Chief Tim Grams said the Fire Department received a call about 3:30 p.m. that a sanitation truck was in flames on South Main Street, right next to the Synovus bank building. The driver of the truck was able to get out and was not injured, Statesboro City Manager Charles Penny said at the scene.

The fire forced the area extending out for several blocks from the Bulloch County Courthouse down East, South, West and North Main streets to be shut down to all traffic until about 5 p.m. South Main Street from Vine Street to the courthouse intersection remained closed until 5:45 p.m. while crews cleaned up the immediate area around the fire.

With flames rising several feet above the truck and smoke filling the downtown area, a firefighter in a crane from above drenched the truck with a fire suppressant foam mixed with water, while firefighters on the ground flooded the truck with water to put out the initial flames.

“Basically it’s water and a fire-fighting foam,” Grams said. “It helps water penetrate a little better. It also creates suds to help suffocate a fire and prevent it from re-igniting.”

Grams said the sanitation vehicle is one of the city’s natural gas trucks. He said they are well insulated and did not appear to ever have been in danger of being damaged by the fire.

“The natural gas tanks are on top of the truck,” he said. “They have protective cases around the tanks. When we got on the scene, that was the primary concern, but it doesn’t look like the fire reached them. Also, the tanks are set up with relief valves, so if they were to receive a lot of heat, the theory is they won’t explode, gas will be released by the pressure-relief valves.

“Once we were confident the danger with the tanks was taken care of, the primary concern became all the runoff. There’s a lot of contaminants in that water,” he said. “There’s not much we can do about that as we contain the fire. We will put some mitigating things in place to minimize what’s going into the stormwater drains.”

While the cause of the vehicle fire was unknown in the immediate aftermath, the front of the truck was significantly charred. Grams speculated the fire may have started in the driver’s cab and spread back to the truck, but he said the ultimate cause would need more investigation.

The sanitation truck was towed to an area where Grams said it would be dumped and the fire completely extinguished.