That is so horrible. How absolutely terrible. Poor horses. Poor Boyd.
That's why I have fire alarms. The trouble is if you don't happen to be right there, the alarms may not help - if you have a lot of hay in the barn, it may even not help if you are there - my friend's hay barn fire, the fire was so hot, it melted metal bolts in the concrete pad that weren't even near the flames.
I would recommend that anyone who has horses, take a fire safety course and be SURE they knw how to handle a LARGE fire extinguisher. Keep several of them in the barn and make sure they are charged up and checked every single year. There are a good number of barn fires that happen around inadequate wiring. Be sure your wiring is properly installed, and that any modifications you make are up to code. Owner modifications to electrical systems are often a source of fires.
BE VERY SURE that if you have electric hot water heaters for waterers, that you open up the waterer and very, very frequently, remove any and all stray bits of dust, cobwebs and feed, bedding and hay.
Be absolutely sure that any space heaters are checked frequently. Be sure the plugs and cords are not getting frayed, kinked or damaged. If at all possible, avoid using space heaters at all in the barn. A special source of danger is battery chargers. Be sure your tractor battery is charged VERY FAR AWAY from the barn, from hay, from bedding.
ALSO - clean all cob webs away from walls and ceilings frequently. BE SURE cob webs are cleaned away from all conduit, wiring and electrical outlets frequently. Really consider having your hay and bedding in another building, with a fire brake distance between the two buildings.
As a firefighter told me years ago, 'Layout, layout, layout'. Storing hay in a barn with the horses has become such a well known hazard that many insurance companies refuse to insure barns that store substantial amounts of hay in the same structure with their horses and equipment. Some insurance compnies don't insure barns that have overhead haylofts - these are recognized to increase hazards very, very substantially.
Alarms connected to the fire department can help. There are services that can be provided (at rather a great cost).
BUT...one has to realize that the average fire fighter knows very little about horses. When there was a fire at a boarding barn in another county, several of the fire fighters were seriously injured trying to handle the horses. Their solution to the barn fire was to turn all the horses loose in the gravel and pavement parking lot - several horses injured themselves or each other. With 60 horses, though, there aren't enough paddocks to separate the horses sufficiently.
For those who don't know, horses do not understand that they need to leave their stalls when there is a fire. Nor does the old trick of blindfolding them always work. Some horses refuse to move when blindfolded. I've heard that in some cases, horses have been sedated, and then are easier to remove from a barn.
Their stall is their safe place, and they don't understand when their favorite safe place has a fire.
It doesn't matter, though, if they don't have stalls. Wherever they feel safe, they will try to go there, whether it's a safe place in that situation or not.
A barn overhang, a turnout shed, even a grove of trees, can become a trap for horses during a fire.
When we built our barn we made sure we had a fire area all the way around the barn, so the fire couldn't spread to the woods or other properties (or our house).
We also are going to fence in an area away from the barn, but what I'd really like is a 'fire lane'.
There's a narrow lane put up at least 200' from the barn or storage buildings, and there are gates in it, so that there is a little pen created when each gate in the lane is shut - one for every stall in the barn, one little enclosure for each horse in the barn. One plan I saw had a double bar(pipe) for each little section, so the horses could not get close enough to each other to bite or kick. If the barn goes down, they could be in that lane for days, awaitig transport to a boarding stable or emergency shelter.
The top eventers do everything they can to protect their horses. While we can't prevent every single tragedy, we can do a lot to increase our odds.
