PORTAGE, Wis. -- A major fire Saturday afternoon in Columbia County had crews working to save a county waste management building.

No one was injured in the fire, but the county is now trying to figure out a contingency plan to deal with the hundreds of tons of waste the facility sees every day.

At about 10:30 this morning, fire crews responded to a fire at Columbia County Solid Waste, a warehouse-type building on Highway 16 near Portage.

The building is a holding and processing area for both waste and construction building materials, which authorities had to remove and hose down to get to other spot fires inside.

Nine fire crews from around the county helped fight the blaze, but the Portage fire chief said he's not sure how the fire might have started or if the building can be salvaged, WISC-TV reported.

"We're not positive on [the cause] yet," said Portage Fire Department Fire Chief Clayton Simonsen "We have to wait till we get everything out of there, cleaned up and see where we're at with that"

Columbia County Solid Waste Management Director Bill Casey said that the county should be able to make a contingency plan work.

"We have contingency plans in place, and we can work for quite a while," said Casey. "It'll be a nuisance, but it won't be devastating. We should be able to work around it for a while"

Casey said they have backup contracts with both Outagamie and Winnebago counties, so the hundreds of tons of trash will have to be transported to those counties for processing until the facility is back up and running.

Casey said it wasn't normal operating hours for the facility, but there were people nearby around 10 Saturday morning dropping off trash close to the road, and nobody reported anything then.

The Portage fire chief says the fire is under investigation.