Strong wind gusts Tuesday likely fanned four fires, including two that destroyed a home northwest of Warrenton and two garages on Highway M. The fires occurred in a span of approximately three hours between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. Warrenton and Wright City firefighters, assisted by four other nearby fire department crews, shuttled to and from each of the calls. The St. Charles Strike Team also responded to at least one of the two brush fires. A crew from Boone County also was assembled, but was never dispatched to the area, according to fire officials. A family lost all of its belongings and was displaced from its home located on Oakleaf Court off of Township Line Road. By the time Wright City Fire Chief Ron MacKnight first arrived on the scene around 1 p.m., the home was fully engulfed. He said the priority shifted to saving an adjacent garage as the first set of crews responded. Crews from Warrenton, Wright City, Marthasville, Wentzville, Hawk Point and Jonesburg responded to the scene. Two adults were home at the time of the fire, but they escaped without injury. “Our main concern was to save the garage when there was nothing to be saved from the home,” MacKnight said. “We focused on protecting the garage.” Firefighters remained on the scene throughout the afternoon as the fire spread into a wooded area surrounding the home and required some trees to be cut down. An official cause of the fire was not immediately determined, but Warrenton Fire Chief Mike Owenby speculated that a nearby burn barrel may have been the source. He said the strong winds could have reignited ashes in the barrel and strong winds could have spread them toward the house. Owenby said a similar cause may have led to the start of the first fire reported Tuesday around 11 a.m. That blaze destroyed multiple vehicles parked inside two garages at a property located on Highway M across from Schuetzenground Road. He said a homeowner had recently cleaned an outside wood stove and put the ashes in a tub filled with water where it sat for a couple of days. The homeowner then dumped the ashes at the tree line on the property, but Owenby said Tuesday’s wind gusts likely caused the fire to rekindle. The fire then spread to the garages. He said all of the vehicles parked inside the structures were destroyed, with the possible exception of one car. Firefighters also responded and extinguished a 2- to 3-acre brush fire in the area of Mark Peterson Lane south of Innsbrook at the same time crews were battling the house fire. Around 2 p.m. a small brush fire near the intersection of Highway M and Schuetzenground Road was reported but was quickly extinguished. Owenby said it’s rare to field so many calls in that short amount of time. “There are only a handful of times we’ve had two structure fires at the same time,” Owenby said. “To get repeated calls like that, we were fighting back to back.” The National Weather Service issued a “red flag warning” Tuesday meaning that a combination of strong winds, low relative humidity and warm temperatures existed to create an explosive fire growth potential. In the same press release, the Missouri Department of Conservation urged landowners to not conduct any outdoor burning.