Burning the barn

We’ve done it, we planned and executed the burning of a 800 square meter barn. Woppee.

The whole thing was a part of the course I’ve been attending the last couple of weeks, yesterday we went out to the place in the morning to have a look at the place and to see what other buildings we needed to protect from the fire. 

As you can see the barn was quite close to the main building, about 40 meters, and even closet to a newer tool shed. But we managed to protect those. We set up four fire pumps at the lake which is about 250 meters to the east of these buildings, three that was supplying water to hoses and three water walls, and one in backup just in case. then we rolled out something like 1.2 km of 4″ hoses and a then some 2.5″ hoses.

Then after a few problems with the pumps and a few broken hoses that needed replacing we were ready to light up place. The fire was lit in an old sofa in the north end of the barn at 10:25 and after about 8 minutes the whole place was ablaze. At 11:13 the last south wall finally collapsed inwards as planned and at 11:35 there was no more danger that the fire would escalate outside the foundation of the building so the fire pumps were shut down. It’s kind of scare to se how fast the fire grown and how destructive it is, but it’s also nice to have experienced this so close.

I’ll se if I cannot create a timeline of the pictures I took as the fire progressed some day when I get back home.