City firefighters extinguished a fire at a wooden pallet manufacturing company late Wednesday morning in North Utica, officials said.

The fire broke out at 10:09 a.m. at the Temple-Inland company on Harbor Lock Road as workers were removing wooden pallets from a detached heat-treating building, Chief Fire Marshal Raymond Beck said.

As the workers returned to remove the remaining pallets, they smelled something burning and noticed the pallets were on fire, Beck said.

After firefighters arrived at the scene, the fire was brought under control in about 20 minutes, Beck said.

The heat-treating building is a total loss, and the fire also damaged a nearby storage container, Beck said.

The heat-treating building is part of the production process in which manufactured or recycles pallets are heated to a specific temperature in order to kill any bugs in the wood, Beck explained. This is done in order to meet requirements for shipping the pallets overseas.

Now, fire investigators are looking into what caused the fire to erupt.

"We're going to have to try to determine if there was a foreign material on the pallets that may have caused the ignition, or if there was a malfunction in the heating equipment, which consisted of two natural gas-fired heaters," Beck said