VIDEO: Massive fire takes out grain cart and tractor during Sask. harvest

A fiery tableau of oranges and reds isn’t uncommon in Saskatchewan near dusk, but on Thursday evening on a farm near Yellow Grass, the fiery colours were a little too real.

Dana Quigley said a fire engulfed a grain cart and tractor on her farm as they were in the middle of harvest.

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She said it had just finished unloading, and was heading back to the east side of the field.

“I look up, because I heard the word ‘fire’ come over the walkie-talkie. Sure enough, and from my view it was spreading to the crop that we have left standing,” Quigley explained Friday morning during an appearance on The Greg Morgan Morning Show.

She said the grain cart operator saw the fire, stopped quickly and grabbed a water tank that was mounted on the wall.

“We all made our way down there as fast as we could, grabbed the fire extinguishers off the remaining three combines, put it out – it just kept firing back up,” Quigley said.

Eventually, she said, they used up all their water.

“With the ground being so wet, you’d think things wouldn’t catch on fire like that, but wow,” she said.

The community tried to help. The local fire department was called, a neighbour tried to bring their water truck, and Quigley’s uncle tried to show up with his water truck as well. But she said there was standing water in the way, and the muddy fields slowed them down.

“The water truck, by the time he got there, it was too far gone. The tractor just went up. Took about eight minutes,” she explained, adding that they’d had to pull two other trucks out of the field already that day.

Quigley was thankful there wasn’t much wind, but said everyone was worried about the fire spreading to the crop so they brought a discer over and tilled a firebreak around the equipment.

“Thank heavens everybody just handled everything personally, the best way we could. Nobody was hurt. Everybody was safe,” she said.

(Rustie Sobchuk/Submitted)

The cart and tractor were a complete write-off, according to Quigley, and the fire took some of the surrounding crop with it.

“It’s very disheartening, because after all the excitement and the fact that everybody’s safe and nothing was more damaged, you just sit there and you’re like ‘Wow, now we’ve got to somehow replace this,’” she said.

Like many farmers in the province, Quigley said they’re already behind in harvest. In past years, she said they’d been as far as 90 per cent done by late September, but are only at 56 per cent right now.