BY JOYCE BUPP
Staff Correspondent
STEWARTSTOWN - Smoke
pouring from the top of his silo was
the last thing Jerry McCleary
expected to find as he topped the
hill into the family’s dairy farm
Sunday noon.
He was equally stunned to* see
the roof of the sealed steel unit
completely gone.
On the ground below lay large
chunks of the white fiberglass
dome. Several pieces had also
landed on the adjoining freestall
facility housing the dairy herd,
leaving three sizeable holes in the
metal roof.
“It just exploded,” lamented
McCleary. “But my first thought
was that the roof had completely
burned.”
Firemen from the nearby
Stewartstown Eureka Company
had already been on the scene
while McCleary, his wife Gretna,
and their children Kenton and Kim
were still attending church. An
unidentified neighbor apparently
called County Control for
assistance at the farm about 11:15
a.m., when the explosion jarred
the surrounding rural countryside.
“One neighbor about a mile up
the road told us his house windows
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Silo trouble runs
rattled,” McCleary related later in
the afternoon, as white smoke
continued to drift up from the
roofless storage unit.
Superstitious or not, McCleary is
becoming a believer of the theory
that bad events arrive in a series of
threes. Sunday’s fire marked the
third in two years to hit the eight
year-old silo.
The contents, 350 tons of winter
feed for the McCleary’s 70-head
milking Holsteins, 22 heifers and
dry cows, are expected to continue
smouldering for some time. About
three-fourths full, the 25 by 72-foot
unit held an estimated 300 tons of
corn silage, topped with SO tons of
haylage.
While running silage for the
Sunday morning feeding, Mc-
Cleary’s son Kenton recalled
noticing that the feed was dark in
color and had a “different” odor.
McCleary also remembered that
earlier in the week the unloader
unit had seemed to periodically
drag at a certain spot in the silage.
He speculates now that there was a
section of the feed already
smouldering then.
McCleary related a history of
problems keeping the bottom
unloader installation sealed and
believes that air drew into the unit,
Mm the revolution
in threes for McClearys
A silo that blew its top: that's what Stewartstown dairy farmer Jerry McCleary found
on arriving home from church last Sunday.
allowing enough oxygen to permit
combustion.
With the roof already in pieces,
there was little firemen or Mc-
Cleary could do with the fire, other
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than let the contents complete the
burning out process.
“It had to be a whopping ex
plosion; probably an air pocket
opened up,” figures the dairyman,
who says he’ll go back to trench
storage for silage, and dispose of
the upright structure.
By mid-afternoon on Sunday,
McCleary was already lining up
hay supplies to replace the feed
destroyed in the fire.
The first fire in the silo occured
during the summer of 1984 witi
the unit about half full of feed. Last
summer, the problem returned.
That supply of some 100 tons of
feed was unloaded before major
structure damage could occur and
is still stacked behind the bam and
is the subject of an insurance
company dispute.
. While the contents of the silo and
the unloader are insured, Mc-
Cleary says the structure itself
was not covered.
Learning to raise
vegetables
ANNAPOLIS, MD - Are you
planning to raise fresh market
fruits and vegetables in 1986? Will
this be your first year at it, or are
you planning to raise greater
quantities than in the past 7
The Marketing Services Section
of the Maryland Department of
Agriculture wants to help you find
buyers for your fruit and vegetable
production and is going to use two
new, modern tools to help out
according to Jack Frey who is
coordinating the project.
“First, we will use a 24-hour, toll
free telephone system to allow you
to feed us the information rather
than relying on the mails, as
before.
“Then we will computerize our
listings so that we can update them
instantly and provide fast in
formation and printouts for in
terested buyers. In the past two
years, we had been relying on an
old-fashioned looseleaf book which
really wasn’t too fast during the
rush of the growing and selling
season,” Mr. Frey said.
Farmers wishing to list their
crops can start the process by
calling the toll-free line (in
Maryland) at 1-800-638-2209.