It was Friday night and Hailey Fountain and two teenage riders from her horse barn were wrapping up a long day at the Big E.
They had shown horses all day in at the Big E horse show in the coliseum. The show ended at 10 p.m. and now there was a concert so they decided to wait until the concert traffic left before they would leave.
It would prove to be a fortuitous decision.
The concert goers had left the fairgrounds and around 11:40 p.m., Fountain, who owns a farm in Belchertown, Mass., walked back to C Barn where their horses were stabled. She had her dog with her. The girls rode ahead in a golf cart and went into the barn.
The next thing she knew, her cell phone was ringing. She answered and the girls were screaming. “The barn’s on fire!”
Fountain doesn’t even remember if she hung up. She ran.
“The flames were up over the top of the front aisles, very visible,” Fountain said. “Very clear that it was on fire. (The girls) had dragged our horses out. I grabbed them. The (girls) ran back in. I was screaming to open the doors, so they ran through, and they were opening doors and letting horses out. They went through almost the whole barn.”
Other people were there, too, opening stall doors, letting panicked horses escape. In all, 161 horses were evacuated from the barn, as the fair was closing for the night. Vendors were closing their tents. Workers were cleaning up.
Suddenly, herds of horses — Saddlebreds, Friesians , Hackney ponies, Morgans – all the flashy horses who had been high stepping in the spotlight with their riders in the coliseum earlier, were now running scared through the fairgrounds.
“They all started coming out into the aisle and some of them were turning toward the fire,” Fountain said. “(One of the girls) grabbed a whip and cracked it and they all came running straight at me. As they’re running, the flames had caught the ceiling, and the ceiling was on fire.
“They’re flying, I’m holding my dog, I’m holding four horses and as they come crashing out, I had to jump back, our horses got hit and I had to let them go. It was very traumatic.
“I had our horses and then I had to let them go.”
She wouldn’t see them again for two hours.
“The things I saw will scar me for life,” said Fountain, 26. “I have not slept in days.”
“It was just crazy”
Heather Nixon of Marlborough was sleeping in C Barn next to their horse stalls with her husband, Jake, Friday night. They had only been asleep for an hour when a buzzing sound woke them up.
“We sleep in the stall in case something weird happens like this,” said Nixon, who co-owns Nixon Hills Arabians farm in Marlborough with her mother-in-law. “In hindsight, we were like, ‘That was a good choice.’”
Nixon drew the curtain aside and saw smoke, so thick she couldn’t see the end of the aisle. She threw some Crocs on, ran to the stalls, and she and Jake let their three horses out.
Other people were letting horses out. The aisles were roped off to keep fairgoers from going into the stall areas. Horses were getting jammed there. Jake took the ropes down so the horses could get through.
When they made it outside, Heather went to look for her horses. Jake went back into the barn to help get more horses out.
One of Heather’s horses ran to the front lawn of the state buildings with some other horses and stopped. She was able to catch hers. Her two other horses were also caught.
“Everybody grabbed whatever horse they could grab,” Nixon said. “Some (horses) went toward the state buildings, some went towards the rides, some went around back to the Mallory building. Some went toward the front, Gate One.
“My husband said he was yelling at them to close Gate One and the guy didn’t close Gate One. It was just crazy.”
“Everybody worked together”
Joe Alger, a 4-H volunteer from East Haddam, was in his camper when someone pounded on the door and said there was a fire.
No one knew where it was. He went to the 4-H barn, E Barn, and that was fine. Then he saw some show horses running around and realized that it was in C Barn. In the 4-H barn, people started clearing out stalls that held tack and hay and grain so they would have some place to put the other horses.
“I did not see the fire,” Alger said. “It was out by the time I got there. The fire suppression system worked, put the fire out. But the fire department was there, after, pumping smoke out of the building. You couldn’t see four feet into the barn. It was so thick. I was probably 10 feet away from the door and you could taste it. I tasted it all day. It’s an old building. Probably stuff you shouldn’t be breathing in.”
Then Alger did what the rest of the horse people there did – he went off to track down loose horses. He helped catch a few out by the giant slide. Back at E Barn, the runaway horses were being put into empty stalls. The 4-H volunteers put duct tape on the stalls so when the owners found their horses, they could write down their names and phone numbers.
“We didn’t know whose horse was whose, we were just putting them in the stalls,” Alger said. “All the owners were running around, trying to find their horses. It was crazy. But everybody pitched in. From the open show people to the 4-H people, even the Clydesdale people were there. They were all helping.
“Somebody brought 40-50 water buckets, and everybody started hanging water buckets in the stalls. Everybody worked together – the horse people did – to alleviate the situation and calm people down.”
The horse owners were grateful.
“The 4-H people were beyond amazing,” Fountain said. “They were 110 thousand percent ready to help. They went out of their way to go above and beyond to make sure the horses had a place to go, to make sure they had what they needed.”
Fire possibly caused by “electrical event”
Fountain’s riders were in the barn when the fire started.
“There was a grinding sound and then a pop, then they saw flames coming up over the second aisle,” Fountain said they told her.
Jake Wark, a spokesperson for Mass. Department of Fire Services, said Wednesday that the investigators were looking at “an electrical event” that started in a stall as a potential cause of the fire, but had not reached a conclusive determination on the exact cause.
They found no evidence the fire was intentionally set, he said.
Fountain had heard from someone that two of her barn’s four horses had run down to Gate 9 toward the back of the fairgrounds. Eventually, three of the horses were found. But Dante, a black Friesian owned by a trainer at her Silent Serenity Training farm, had left the Big E property and run down the railroad tracks, heading toward Route 5.
A drone team from Massachusetts Fire Services was helping to track the horses and communicating that information to law enforcement, who were helping search for the runaway horse. According to a Facebook post by the horse’s owner, Jamie Caesar, a police officer found the horse on Route 5 and stopped traffic and caught him with his belt. Caesar, who was driving around with her horse trailer frantically looking for him, finally found him and loaded him into her trailer.
“He ran four miles,” Fountain said. “He was at a dead flat gallop. He jumped a 3 ½ foot guard rail.”
Many horses had cuts and bruises on their legs, but Dante was more seriously injured, requiring 50 stitches to sew up a big gash between his front legs. When Fountain finally got to her horse, a pinto Saddlebred mare, she found out she had also been injured.
“I opened the door and from the knees down, her legs were trashed,” Fountain said. “I was mortified. I didn’t know she was injured.
“Between her and Dante’s injuries, it’s pretty significant. I think she fell.”
One of Nixon’s horses also needed stitches.
“I don’t know if he got in a fight with a tent or something, because that was the one who needed the stitches,” Nixon said. “He was all chewed up. The other one had a bunch of little road burns on him. I’m not sure where they went.”
Danielle Neidlinger, who owns Lingering Hills Stable in East Windsor, had three horses in C Barn. One was let out; two were in the back of the barn and didn’t get let out right away.
Concerned about smoke inhalation, Neidlinger treated them for breathing issues, but said they seem fine.
“I’m so thankful it wasn’t worse than it was,” she said.
Anger at the reaction
After a traumatic night, during which horse owners and trainers and people involved in the rescue had slept little or not at all, the Big E put out a statement the next day saying that a “minor fire” had occurred and that “we are grateful for the prompt response from our team and authorities, plus all exhibitors who are supporting each other during this transition.”
Gene Cassidy, the Big E CEO, went on a local TV station to talk about the fire.
“Fire suppression kicked in, (West Springfield) Fire was here immediately,” he said in the interview. “We had 161 horses in the barn…there were so many horses, a few of them got loose. But they’re all accounted for. There were some minor injuries to the horses. They were a little excited. They had some abrasions and a couple of them needed a stitch or two.”
Cassidy went on to say that a couple employees from the Big E cleaning services had been injured – one with a broken leg and another with a broken rib.
He also said they’d “be up and running in this barn by the end of the day.”
But some of the people who were there took umbrage at his characterization of “a few horses” getting loose and some needing a “stitch or two.”
“You have a CEO doing an interview telling people a few horses got loose and were running around excited – ‘excited’ is not the word I would use,” Fountain said. “These horses took down tents, they went through the midway, they took down game things. They took down fences. They were running through the fronts of the state buildings. They were crashing into each other. It was like watching a war.”
The horse show refunded all fees to horse owners involved with the show, which was canceled after the fire, but Fountain thought that didn’t go far enough.
“I want the Big E to take accountability, to offer some kind of assistance, they should be paying for these vet bills,” she said.
Neidlinger and others involved said they felt the same way about the response.
“I guess what I don’t understand is why they needed to downplay this to the public,” she said. “I mean, yes, nobody was seriously injured, but there was no compassion. There wasn’t knowledge given that (horse) professionals were there, they didn’t even acknowledge the 4-H-ers who played a huge role that night in saving horses.
“They just said there was a minor fire, and the horses were accounted for and fine. It could’ve been a tragedy. And that tragedy was avoided by (horse) professionals being there. I think it was an opportunity to educate and acknowledge what people did to save the day instead of saying nothing happened.”
The Big E did not respond to requests for comment on the situation.
Fountain doesn’t even want to think about what would have happened if the fire occurred earlier, with all the concertgoers leaving the fair.
“Ten minutes before this happened, I watched multiple people walking through those grounds,” she said. “If that had happened literally 10 minutes before, you know how many people would be dead?”
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