Firefighter foams, such as AFFF (Look it up - useful for suppressing vapors) are used in conjunction with water - they are literally drawn into the firestream and the water is how they are applied. I'm not sure if any of those type of things were used or not, but, unless you know what you are dealing with before you start firefighting operations, the things that are usually done first are to "put the wet stuff on the red stuff" and worry about the runoff after the fact. That goes double for volunteer departments which are more than likely a large part of the response during the early stages because they know their resources will be exhausted if they don't react quick enough.