Wellman fire kills 5,000 hogs

WELLMAN - An estimated 5,000 pigs died in a nursery fire Tuesday night.

Wellman Fire Chief Jeremy Peck said the department was dispatched just before 10 p.m. to a hog confinement in the 1500 block of Ginko Avenue, which is 3.5 miles south of Wellman. A nursery building was reported to be fully engulfed in flames, Peck said.

The Keota Fire Department was paged at the same time as Wellman, and Kalona Fire was also paged for mutual aid, Peck said.

Peck said when units arrived, fire had spread throughout the building and flames were visible through the roof. Water and gas lines to the building were shut off and firefighters made an outside attack on the structure. The structure, which Peck described as a research nursery, housed roughly 5,000 25-pound pigs. Peck said all of the pigs died in the blaze. There were no civilian or firefighter injuries.

There were five to seven other structures on the site, but firefighters kept the fire from spreading to those other buildings, Peck said. Because the building was destroyed in the fire, Peck said the fire department won't be able to determine what caused the blaze.

'We don't know if it was electrical or gas from heaters or some sort of gas regulator that went bad,” he said.

Peck said they had adequate water from tankers and good wind conditions for fighting the fire.

'You really couldn't ask for a better situation than what we had,” he said. 'No complications whatsoever as far as the fire department or ambulances were concerned.”