The smell of burnt hay and wood was still heavy in the air at Broom?s Bloom Dairy Farm in Bel Air on Thursday morning.
A grain loader rested on its side with a pile of smoldering debris next to it, and where a modern dairy barn once stood, nothing existed but an empty space.
“My wife looked out the window [Tuesday] and saw the smoke rising in the air, and said, ?God, I hope that?s not Dallam?s,? ” said Syd Peverly, of Boxwood Farms just north of Broom?s Bloom.
Peverly was one of close to a dozen farmers from around Harford County who came to the aid of David and Kate Dallam Thursday to help the couple clean up after a two-alarm fire destroyed their 200-by-80-foot dairy barn just off of Fountain Green Road Tuesday morning.
Fire investigators said the blaze was caused when hay came in contact with the exhaust pipe of a front-end loader being used to move the hay.
“Unfortunately, a situation like this, as bad as it is, that brings people together,” Peverly said.
“Everyone was there to help,” said Annette Ensor, a soil conservationist for Harford County and a friend of the Dallam family.
Ensor said that after going to the scene Tuesday morning, people in her office ? Harford County Farm Service Agency ? began calling dairy farmers all over Harford, and by Tuesday afternoon, 47 out of 57 Holstein cows that survived the fire had been moved to other farms around the county.
“Pretty much the whole farming community came out,” said Broom?s Bloom owner David Dallam.
Cpl. James Kozlewski of the Maryland State Police was flown to University of Maryland Shock Trauma Center after he was injured while helping to rescue cows trapped in the barn. He has since been released.
Dallam, who is planning to rebuild the dairy barn, said Thursday: “There?s a lot of work to do, so we?re just going to do it.”
