Pioneer Flowers in St. Catharines has a major fire that started Friday night and burned until Saturday evening. y. The road was blocked at our favourite cherry tart winery. Pioneer is just south of 13th Street Winery, so everything was off limits. The smoke was billowing from the area when I was there in the morning. There were hotspots at 7:00pm Saturday evening.
Here are the St. Catharines Standard pictures of the fire on Friday night at 11:00pm and then Saturday in the day.
Their facility had 300,000 square feet of greenhouse space and three acres of cold storage. There were packaged tulips and peat moss. Can you imagine? Peat is still used as a fuel in parts of the world. And then there are the chemicals, plastic pots and wraps that are used in a greenhouse operation - that could be toxic. The living quarters and all the belongings of the migrant workers were destroyed, so people have been donating to rebuild their homes and personal lives.
What I notice about breaking news is it gets reported over and over, and then all goes dead or just a few updates. The Pioneer Flower Farms website has a statement on their home page of the website. It is HERE. They say they are continuing to harvest their outdoor flower crops. These are the sunflower fields where I never get to take a picture of blooming sunflowers - they get mechanically picked before the bright sunny heads open up. The Star Wars-looking machines hulk their way over the fields, seemingly leaving everything devastated (To the photographer's eye).
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