The Dayton, Ohio Fire Department avoided a double disaster by not attempting to extinguish a massive fire in a paint warehouse. The fire started on May 27, 1987, and completely destroyed the Sherwin-Williams Paint Warehouse. The dollar loss was $32 million, but only one employee was seriously injured and one firefighter sprained his leg. The noncombustible, sprinklered warehouse contained over 1.5 million gallons of paints and other products and was located over the aquifer from which wells provided the water supply for about one-third of the area’s 400,000 people. Uncontained water and chemical run-off from firefighting could have contaminated this water supply and caused a greater loss than the fire itself, as occurred in Switzerland after the Sandoz Chemical Warehouse fire in 1986 contaminated the Rhine.