Fire destroys feed processing plant near Somers

The Daily Inter Lake

A feed processing plant near the intersection of Montana 82 and Lower Valley Road was destroyed Wednesday night in a fire.

Machinery and tons of hay inside the plant, which is owned by XL Feeds, were lost or extensively damaged.

"The building is a total loss," said Somers Fire Chief Rich Boon, whose department responded to the fire shortly before midnight and stayed there until midday Thursday.

Except for what was in the midst of being processed and some finished product, most of the plant's hay was outside the building, said Betty McConkey, who owns XL Feeds with her husband and family.

"We still have a lot of hay, just no way to process it," she said.

The plant grinds hay and compresses it into cubes about an inch thick and a couple inches long for packaging and then sale as feed. The McConkeys, who live next to the plant, grow the hay in an adjacent field.

Besides machinery to grind and compress hay, conveyors, forklifts, equipment to sew the finished product into bags, between 10 and 15 tons of baled hay, eight tons of compressed hay cubes awaiting bagging and 30 tons of finished cubes on pallets were damaged or destroyed in the fire.

McConkey said she could not yet attach a dollar figure to the damage. No one was injured in the blaze.

Firefighters responded to the 6,000-square-foot steel structure at 11:50 p.m. Wednesday after a passer-by alerted the plant's owners to the flames and called authorities.

The fire's cause is undetermined, but there were space heaters in the plant's office and workers had been repairing equipment with welding tools, Boon said.

A failing roof and the quantity of hay burning inside the plant forced firefighters to attack the fire from outside the building. With the exception of some of the baled hay, firefighters had to wait for daybreak to drag smoldering material outside and extinguish it.

"All we could do was pour water on it," Boon said. "Anytime you get a hay fire in a structure, it's pretty much impossible to put out until you get the hay outside the building."

The South Kalispell Fire Department responded to the fire with two tenders and a rescue truck and the Bigfork Fire Department responded with a tender. A second tender from that department was placed on stand-by.

About 25 firefighters from the three departments fought the fire.