Perfect timing saves the day

SWANVILLE, Minn. — The morning of Feb. 8 started out like any other day at Joe Staricka’s farm. However, that day will stand out in Staricka’s memory for a long time to come. 

Staricka and his wife, Diane, milk 60 cows in a tiestall barn near Swanville. Staricka completed his usual morning chores and parked his skid loader in the shop since it was raining. As usual, he headed to the house around 9 a.m. for breakfast, and since it was raining, he stayed in the house to rest.

“I walked through the shop on my way to the house and nothing seemed out of the ordinary,” Staricka said.

Shortly before 1 p.m., Staricka received a call from longtime friends Mark and Barb Malmanger. The Malmangers wanted to visit and drop off a gift since the Starickas recently celebrated their 29th wedding anniversary. Staricka was home alone while Diane was visiting her dad.

When the Malmangers pulled into the Starickas’ yard and started to get out of their car, suddenly, the garage door to the shop opened by itself revealing the skid loader engulfed in flames.

“I opened the front door of the house, and Mark is just trucking to the house as fast as he can,” Staricka said. “I opened the door, and he yelled, ‘Joe, your skid loader is on fire.’ I got my boots as fast as I could, which seemed to take forever.”

As Staricka ran across the yard to the shop, he was confused as to why the garage door was open because he knew he closed it earlier that day.

“I asked Mark and Barb if they had opened the door,” Staricka said. “I thought maybe they went there first to look for me. They told me they saw it open when they pulled in.”

Focusing their attention on the active fire, Staricka grabbed the fire extinguisher he kept in the shop and aimed it at the skid loader. Unfortunately, that had little effect.

“I had my 1086 tractor sitting nearby, and I started that up, backed up to the burning skid loader, tied a chain to it and dragged it out of the shop so nothing else would catch fire,” Staricka said. “Then, I called the fire department.”

The Swanville Fire Department arrived and quickly put out the fire. They brought their thermal imaging sensors to check the walls of the shop for hot spots. Much to everyone’s relief, the fire had not spread.

“It was 5 in the afternoon when my pulse finally came down to a normal range,” Staricka said.

Smoke and the intense heat from the fire ruined the garage door, the electrical wiring and the plastic air compressor line along the shop wall where the skid loader had been sitting. The crew also determined what caused the garage doors to spontaneously open.

“It was just amazing that the insulation melted and caused the wires to make contact and triggered the garage door to open,” Staricka said. “Without that, I would have lost more than a skid loader.”

As the events of the day unfolded, déjà vu set in for Staricka.

“It was 15 years ago that I lost my entire shop in that exact same spot,” he said. “A lot of memories came flooding back suddenly. I was very relieved that the skid loader was all that was lost this time.”

 For the next several days, every time Staricka walked through his shop, the smell of smoke filled his nose and long-lost memories filled his mind.

“The next few days when I was doing chores, I would think, ‘Oh, I need this or that,’ and, ‘Oh, shoot, that was in the shop.’ Then I remembered, ‘Oh, that’s right, it’s OK this time; it was just the skid loader this time. I will just need to use a flashlight to find it,’” Staricka said. “After my first shop fire, it was a couple of years of, ‘Oh, I need this or that,’ and remembering that it was in the shop and that I don’t have it anymore.”

Staricka said the skid loader was one he bought to replace the skid loader that was lost in the first fire.

“This skid loader that burned up had 9,600 hours on it, and I was really looking forward to hitting 10,000 hours,” Staricka said. “But, it didn’t make it. I hope I can buy my next skid loader by choice instead of by force.”

The day after the fire, the fire inspector looked at the skid loader. The inspector told Staricka that he sees 20-25 skid loader fires a year.

“I asked him what is the most common cause of those fires,” Staricka said. “He said they are almost all on dairy farms. With being used so much and having dust, hay and chaff around, if a wire was to short out, it doesn’t take much to start a fire.”

At the end of the day, Staricka is grateful for losing only a skid loader. He is also grateful for the Malmangers.

“It was a bad day, but the good luck and the timing of it all just amazed me,” Staricka said. “If that door opened 30 seconds later, Barb wouldn’t have noticed the garage door open, and we would have gone in the house and sat in the kitchen, which is on the other side of the house, and visited for the next hour. Things could have been a lot worse. I’m really glad I don’t have to build a new shop again.”