About 90 cows died after a barn fire on a family farm in Bedford County earlier this month.
Nicole Fuschino spoke with the farm’s owner Today and tells us how he’s mourning the loss of his cattle and his career.
Right here behind me is where a barn stood tall about two weeks ago and now as you can see it’s down to nothing after that devastating fire.
There were almost 100 cows inside and only a few of them made it out alive.
Now the owner tells me he’s doing everything he can to rebuild from the ground up.
“It was a horrible day.”
This is what’s left of the Garman Family Farm along route 96 just outside of Alum Bank
After a fire ripped through their barn earlier this month leaving decades of memories up in smoke.
“What was your initial reaction? *Sighs* I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t do stuff fast enough. I didn’t know what to do first.”
Joe Garman owns the farm
And says while he’s grateful no people were hurt most of his beloved dairy cows are now just a distant memory.
“I’m thinking probably a good 85 we lost total adults and small ones.”
Garman’s parents owned the farm for decades until joe bought it in 1982 and he’s been there ever since.
The structures can be rebuilt but the lives of his cattle cannot ever be.
“I’ve been around these cows, probably have been some of these cows had to have gone back the whole way back to when mother and dad had the farm. Some of the generations that some of the cows had were old. That was sad.”
Joe says he was inside his house like any other day when
“My brother had called me and said, there’s black smoke coming out of the barn. Then I come up around the barn, and it was fully engulfed in fire.”
He says it was a tractor that caught fire inside the barn that led to the tragedy.
“It was a shock.” , “It just went so fast.”
Now they’re in the cleaning up stages to clear out the debris but the memories will always remain.
“I want to say thank you to everybody, cause everybody’s been so nice to me. I hope I can repay it someday.”
If you would like to help joe you can go to any First Commonwealth Bank and tell them you’d like to donate to the Joe Garman fire fund.
