Yeah, I guess there isn't much you could do as a fire fighter, other than try to prevent buildings near by from igniting.
But they didn't want to extinguish the fire anyway, from what I read, because that would have washed even more alcohol into a river.
The damage must be tremendous. Even though the booze is not as expensive to make as its sold in the shop. But 45,000 wooden barrels got destroyed, too. They easily cost $100 or more a piece. And there is no big wood barrel production nowadays, as there was in the 19th century. Each one gets hand made by specialist workmen. There are some interesting videos on YouTube about that. So it will take some time to replace them, and lots of money.