Fire destroyed a barn packed with 300 bales of hay north of Bargersville on Monday night.  But farmer Larry Vandenburg was back at work Tuesday morning, repairing a fence broken the night before. And he plans to rebuild his barn.  “It’s unfortunate, a shame it had to happen,” he said, “but nobody got hurt. That’s the main thing, no lives were lost. Everything can be replaced.”

         Firefighters from seven Johnson County fire departments battled the blaze for more than eight hours before getting it under control.  There were no injuries, to either firefighters or farm animals. The barn is a total loss, and the destroyed hay was worth $9,000 to $12,000. Other barns on the property were undamaged. “This was one of the biggest messes that we’ve ever had to deal with in my 20 years with Bargersville Fire Department,” division chief Mike Pruitt said.  He said the fire likely was started by spontaneous combustion because of the amount of hay stacked in the barn. The barn had no electricity or other utilities.

         Vandenburg was working in another barn on his property at 4599 N. County Road 225W about 6:30 p.m. Monday when his wife, Angelika, came in and asked him if he saw what was going on in the hay barn.  Larry Vandenburg ran outside and saw smoke.  He called 911 and jumped on a four-wheeler to get to the burning barn. When he opened the door to get his tractor out, the smoking hay erupted into flames. He jumped on the tractor and started pulling the 1,200-pound bales of hay out as fast as he could.  He got six bales out by the time firefighters arrived. By that point, about half of the bales inside the barn were engulfed in flames, Pruitt said.  “The firefighters got here quickly, and we’re out here in the country, so there was no water,” Larry Vandenburg said. “They were hauling it in left and right.”  For more than five hours, tankers shuttled water more than a mile from the intersection at Whiteland Road and State Road 135 to the site of the blaze. Pruitt estimated nearly 80,000 gallons of water was used on the fire.

         Around midnight, Dewey Sizemore, Ron Smith and the Vandenburgs’ son, Scott Vandenburg, arrived with excavators and a bulldozer and began pulling the burning bales out and dragging them into a soybean field to extinguish them.  The hay was left in the field, away from other structures, to burn itself out when firefighters left about 3 a.m. Tuesday. As of Tuesday afternoon, the hay was still burning, and Vandenburg expected it to burn for a long time.  “I just stirred the hay up this morning,” he said Tuesday. “It’ll burn for a month if you don’t stir it up.”  The hay was nearly his entire supply, Vandenburg said. He said he likely will have to buy more to have enough to feed his cattle, he said.  A neighbor has already offered to donate some of his hay, and Vandenburg has more hay coming from a third cutting of his fields later in the summer.

         Firefighters from Bargersville, White River Township, Whiteland, Franklin, Amity, Trafalgar and Needham fire departments helped with the fire. Madison Township Fire Department from Morgan County covered the area while the other departments were away.  In addition to putting out the blaze, firefighters used water to keep the fire from spreading to two nearby barns, Pruitt said.   “We had real good help from the excavators,” Larry Vandenburg said, “and the firefighters stayed right with them inside the barn in case of flare-ups.”  His cattle were in a back pasture, away from the barn, when the fire started. Vandenburg closed several gates so the cattle stayed out of harm’s way.  “There wasn’t really much we could do about it,” Vandenburg said, “just hope that no one got injured getting hay out of the barn.”  During the course of the evening, Angelika Vandenburg cooked pizza, breadsticks, muffins and other food for the firefighters.

   
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