The morning after a devastating blaze on his Upper Bern Township egg farm, Linford Snyder walked up to the smoking pile of crumbled sheet metal stretching nearly 600 feet and gave not a hint of a complaint. The Tuesday night blaze collapsed one of the three parallel hen houses on A&L Farms, 3304 Mountain Road, killing all 28,000 chickens inside and as many as 10,000 birds in the adjacent facility, he said. Snyder didn't allow himself to dwell on why, for the second time in 3 1/2 years, one of his cage-free egg-laying houses went up in flames. By 10 a.m. Wednesday he had already taken the first steps toward rebuilding it. As he spoke to a couple of journalists on the farm set on a flat against the stunning backdrop of Blue Mountain, a few members of his Mennonite community were already helping out. Men were using heavy equipment and hand tools to remove chicken carcasses and manure from the still-standing Barn 2. The smoldering ruins of Barn 1, the collapsed hen house where the fire started, were too hot for workers to safely begin the labor-intensive job of pulling apart and hauling off the debris. "I'll have people in here as soon as the fire marshal is done," Snyder said. "I've already contacted all of the authorities for permits to rebuild it. I would be shocked if I'm not up and running in three months." State Trooper Janssen Herb, a fire marshal with Reading-based Troop L, arrived at the farm Wednesday morning, but he couldn't begin to thoroughly examine the ruins because of the heat and smoke coming from the debris. He said the investigation will likely take a few days to complete. Pinpointing a cause in such a huge facility, however, is literally like searching for a needle in a haystack. "It would take a team of 10 investigators days to do what I would like to do," he said. "It's just not feasible." As for a damage estimate, Herb said, "I think we're looking at a multimillion-dollar loss." Meantime, electricians were restoring power to the adjacent egg room where the eggs are stored. Snyder expressed gratitude that firefighters saved that facility from being consumed by the fire, and predicted workers would be packaging eggs in the afternoon. One of the three hen houses was unscathed. That facility alone houses 75,000 birds and is built on the concrete pad that was cleared after the September 2015 fire that caused $1.7 million damage. The facility had recently been cleared of birds and was awaiting the arrival of a new flock when that fire happened. The cause of the 2015 blaze was officially ruled as undetermined by the fire marshal, but Snyder suspects the cause of both fires is electrical in nature. When all is said and done, Snyder expects to the latest fire to have claimed half of the 150,000 chickens. The roughly 30,000 hens that survived smoke conditions in Barn 2 will have to be slaughtered because they'll be too stressed to produced many eggs, he explained. The chickens are Humane-certified as cage-free fowl. Though they live indoors, they don't spend their lives in cages, he said. "They're raised in a humane manner and I've got all kinds of certs to provide it." He said he was upset by social media comments that the chickens are raised in inhumane conditions. "People who are saying those things have no idea what it's like to work out here," Snyder said. Together, the three houses produced about 130,000 eggs a day, Snyder said. Snyder said the loss isn't covered by traditional insurance. "We have church insurance," he said. "We're Mennonites. The people will be here. It'll be cleaned up by the beginning of next week. I'll have a bare pad out there." Source - https://www.readingeagle.com/