[MSN] Canada. Fire destroys building, museum artifacts

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Fire destroys building, museum artifacts
Witnesses of the fire that destroyed a maintenance shed on the Melfort
Agricultural Society Grounds and a machine shed as well as some large
artifacts on the Melfort and District Museum Grounds Friday morning report
seeing a native male walking away from the area shortly after it was started
at about 7:30 a.m. 

By Greg Wiseman of THE JOURNAL
Tuesday October 02, 2007

Witnesses of the fire that destroyed a maintenance shed on the Melfort
Agricultural Society Grounds and a machine shed as well as some large
artifacts on the Melfort and District Museum Grounds Friday morning report
seeing a native male walking away from the area shortly after it was started
at about 7:30 a.m.
"It is an investigation that you can't put a time frame on," said Melfort
RCMP S/Sgt. Andy Seidemann.
"We go out and we gather our evidence and try to determine what has happened
if that takes a week or two weeks or whatever, we go wherever our evidence
takes us."
Friday morning Walter Toews, the general manager of the Melfort and District
Agricultural Society received a phone call saying a door was open on the
Exhibition Hall, where the volunteer appreciation dinner had occurred the
previous night.
Upon inspection it was determined the facility located west on Wesley St.
had been broken into. Shortly after that smoke was noticed and the Melfort
Fire Department was called.
"It was a supply shed for the fair grounds. There were a number of valuable
pieces of equipment in there, not for a thief, but for us it would have been
really good to keep. I wouldn't even want to hazard a guess on the value of
the things in that shed," said Toews.
When the fire department arrived the storage shed was totally in flames and
the fire had spread through the trees to the machine shed in the southwest
corner of the Melfort Museum Grounds.
"We had guys attack the storage shed from two sides and we sent two more
lines to the north to the museum to get right in there and cut it off at
that point," said Melfort fire chief John McDonald.

He said the winds were blowing to the west and the Four Seasons Arena was
directly in the path of the blaze and in danger of also catching fire.
Both McDonald and Toews said the fire is a suspicious one.
"There is no power to anything over there, it was set ablaze that is for
sure," Toews said.
McDonald agreed.
"It is very suspicious and the RCMP are looking into their end of it."
The fire department acted quickly to try and prevent the blaze from
spreading especially in the Museum Grounds.
"The museum is just a tinderbox. It is all old buildings that are old and
dried out. If something like this comes along it can take out a big part of
it," he said.
"They have a wonderful place there and if the fire started in the wrong spot
we could lose the whole place in a matter of a couple hours."
Lost in the Agricultural Society's maintenance shed was equipment like lawn
mowers, lumber, pumps and other things needed to keep the facility running
smoothly.
Lost in the Melfort Museum machine shop was the original Whittome Snow Plow,
a 1942 Massey Harris combine as well as other small engines, tools which
volunteers were using to construct the building and other small artifacts.
They were still working on it yesterday. We were using it to enclose all our
big major artifacts for the winter," said Gailmarie Anderson, the curator of
the museum.
Ingvar Berggren, a member of the board of directors, said some of the items
in the machine shed were saved but some were lost.
"The fanning mill we had in there is gone now and that is just one example
of what is gone. There were cutters and buggies and other things in there,"
he said while surveying the damage after the fire was extinguished.
"They are artifacts that are irreplaceable. We can rebuild the shed, but we
cannot replace the things that have been lost." 

http://www.melfortjournal.com/