EDMONTON -- Fire destroyed a barn west of Edmonton on Tuesday morning.
The blaze broke out at Corey Jespersen’s farm off Highway 16 and Range Road 273 around 7:30 a.m.
“I got a call from my father who was out feeding cows. He noticed that there was a fire going in the northeast corner of the potato shed,” Jespersen told CTV News Edmonton.
“It didn’t look terribly bad at the beginning. I was confident that we would be able to put it out before it made its way to the rest of the buildings, but it didn’t take long.”
Firefighters from Parkland County, Devon, Stony Plain and Wabamun were called in to fight the flames.
“The one main building was heavily involved in fire in the roof area, and quickly the second building through the roof space became inflamed as well,” said Parkland County Fire Chief Brian Cornforth.
“Our mission and objective was to maintain it to the one structure and prevent any other damage.”
To keep the fire from spreading to any other buildings, firefighters brought in heavy equipment to demolish a hallway between the burning building and a neighbouring one.
Getting water to the site was also a challenge.
“We’ve pumped about 90,000 litres of water that we’ve had to shuttle to the site,” Cornforth said.
Fortunately no one was in the building when the fire broke out, but several pieces of farming equipment and a large quantity of seed potatoes was destroyed.
“There’s likely no way we could salvage any of those out of there,” Jespersen said.
The cause of the fire has not been determined, but damage is believed to be about $4 million.
With files from CTV News Edmonton’s David Ewasuk
