The Blair, Herman, Arlington, Kennard, Nickerson, Winslow and Uehling fire departments responded to a large hay barn fire late Friday evening.
The fire was located at county roads 16 and P11, and took around four hours to extinguish, said Blair Fire Chief Joe Leonard Saturday morning.
"We got paged out shortly after 11 p.m. to a hay bale fire," he said. "Once we figured out what we were dealing with before we even got on scene, we mutual aided Arlington. There was over 100 hay bales that were in a lean-to... so it was very intense. We had to try to get all of those bales out from underneath so we could actually fight the fire, because they were burning deep inside the bales."
The "time-consuming" endeavor ended around 3:30 a.m., Leonard said.
"After speaking with the homeowners, they did grind up some hay here recently, so we're thinking with all the rains we've had, the moisture we've had — when you're grinding, you get smoldering inside that product, and so we're thinking it was spontaneous combustion," Leonard said of the potential cause of the fire.
No other buildings were damaged on the property, Leonard said, though the lean-to building had significant heat damage.
"With us spreading it out, some of it did go into a grove of trees, but we were able to contain that fairly quickly," he said. "There were a couple other structures nearby; however, we kept everything from going into those structures."
