The elevator in Waskada was built in 1961
A fire destroyed a grain elevator in Waskada, Man.
About 50 firefighters from Deloraine, Melite and Waskada Fire Departments received calls about the fire around 5:00 a.m. Tuesday morning.
About three hours later, the grain elevator reduced rubble and debris with the firefighters focused on keeping embers from sparking additional fires.
"It went very, very quickly," Maurice Saltel, the reeve for Brenda-Wakada, told DiscoverWestman.
A thunderstorm passed through the community on the night of the fire.
It’s believed lightning caused the fire, but that hasn’t been confirmed yet.
"We know for sure that there was a thunderstorm directly over Waskada in the night," Saltel said. "That was the bad luck and the good luck in this whole event was just the way it fell, causing the least amount of damage that could possibly happen, just by the direction it fell. And we were experiencing high winds the day before, and that would have been a major thing had the wind been as strong as it had been the previous day."
Farmers supported the firefighters.
Producers provided water to help keep the fire at bay.
“We would like to thank the continuous support of all the farmers supplying water to keep all 3 fire trucks pumping all day long,” the Deloraine Fire Department said on Facebook. “We estimate between the 3 departments we probably pumped upwards of 60,000+ gallons of water.”
Other members of the community provided food.
The elevator was originally built to replace one that succumbed to its own fire.
Manitoba Pool Elevators constructed the Waskada elevator in September 1961 on the CPR Lyelton Subdivision after the other local elevator burned down that June, Manitoba Historical Society Archives say.
Some members of the community are saddened by the fire and remember the fire of 1961.
"Well, it's very sad. I grew up at Waskada, and I guess you could say that's the elevator I grew up in. My dad was on the Pool [Elevator] Board, and I was in that elevator probably 100 times as I was growing up," Jan McClelland, chairperson of the Turtle Mountain Souris Plains Heritage Association, told DiscoverWestman.
"When Dad and my uncle were hauling grain, I went to town with them lots of times. I spent a lot of time in that elevator until I started school. Not so much after that, but still in the summertime during harvest, if we were hauling straight to the elevator rather than putting it in a granary on the farm.”