NEW TROY, Mich. – About 4,000 bushels of freshly harvested corn were ruined when a dryer about the height of a 10-story building caught fire in Michiga on Oct. 13.

Firefighters from multiple departments responded to D & S Farms outside New Troy about 4 a.m. New Troy in is the southwest portion of the state’s Lower Peninsula.

Weesaw Township Fire Chief Ted Nitz said it took about 10 hours to put out the fire contained within the structure consisting of five dryers stacked on top of each other.

“That’s the way they’re built,” he said.

Nitz said firefighters were taken to the top of the dryer on a lift belonging to the farm and used a hose to spray water onto the burning corn below. It took so long to put out the fire because water had to be applied slowly to avoid causing the thin metal in the dryer to warp.

Nitz said heated thin metal coming into contact with too much cold water at once can distort the metal and even result in a collapse of the structure.

“We just put a little water on each time,” he said.

Nitz said dryer fires are caused by a spark created somewhere in the machine coming into contact with dust from the corn. The dust is created from the fine skin on the kernels coming off as the kernels are shrinking a bit as they’re drying, he said.

Nitz said the owner, Dale Seyfred, shut off the augers that send corn – once low enough moisture levels have been attained – to three silos about 500 feet away to prevent any of the burning kernels from getting into the corn already in storage.

He said just a small percentage of the corn in the dryer was burnt but the rest was contaminated by smoke, heavy enough to create a plume rising several hundred feet into the air.

“Pretty much everything is shot,” he said.

Nitz said there was some damage to the dryer, which had been running around the clock, but not enough to keep it from being used again once all the corn was removed and the machine cleaned.

“He will have to rebuild the machine after a while, probably in the spring, but Dale told me he would probably have it up and running yet that evening,” he said.

Nitz said he worked two previous dryer fires in his 30-year firefighting career.

Firefighters from Baroda, Buchanan Township, Galien and New Carlisle, Ind., assisted by shuttling water in tankers to the farm since there were no hydrants nearby at the rural location.