Hundreds of hogs died in a fire that blazed overnight on Thursday at a barn in a Hutterite colony in Nobleford in southern Alberta.
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It’s unclear how the fire was caused, John Hofer, first minister for the Hutterian Brethren Church in White Lake Colony said on Saturday.
“We don’t know what happened,” he said.
“Around 10 p.m. in the evening, one of the boys was looking through the window and looked down at the hog barn and seen the fire going there,” he said. Despite phoning around and attempting to go to the barn to determine what had happened, there was little they could do.
“There was nothing we could do, we couldn’t go into the barn,” he said. “It happened so fast.”
All sows living in the barn died from the fire, he said, potentially due to suffocation.
“They’re all laying on the floor,” he said, as if they were sleeping. It’s unclear how many pigs died in the fire.
“When pigs get excited, they run to one corner and get tied up, but you can see today that all the pigs are laying and sleeping (as if) they went to bed.”
“One thing is they didn’t suffer one bit,” he continued. “I think as soon as it happened, they run out air and they suffocated and they just went to sleep.”
The fire lasted until 3 a.m. early Friday morning. Fire crews from Nobleford & District Emergency Services received a 911 call around 10:30 p.m. Thursday night and arrived on scene to contain the fire. Support was called in from Picture Butte, Coalhurst and Coaldale, according to a report by Global News.
Frank West, fire chief for Picture Butte, confirmed they sent two units to assist with the fire.
The fire, Hofer said, took “a lot of assets” from the community, by whom the barn was owned and operated. “We were depending a lot on the barn for the financial business of our farm and we did a lot of butchering,” he said.
Currently, 90 people live in the community, he said.
It’s unclear if the barn will be rebuilt or replaced with something else. The barn was insured with a firm in Manitoba and the community is currently in discussions with insurance representatives to determine how to respond to the fire.
“We can’t blame anybody because there was nobody there,” he said. The barn, he said, had been kept in good condition.
“It was not the neglect of the management,” he said.