Investigators said it may take some time to determine the cause of a Saturday night blaze — the third since 1997 — that destroyed a livestock barn at Riverview Dairy Farms in Lehigh Township.
“It’s still under investigation,” said Fire Chief Roger A. Spadt. “It will be a while before we get that all together.”
About 60 head of cattle were shooed from the burning building by brothers Todd and Travis Weber, who live nearby, and members of the Williams family, which owns Riverview Farms, after the fire was reported by Tiffany George of Jim Thorpe, who was driving past on Route 145.
It was the latest tragedy to strike the dairy farm, one of the biggest in Northampton County, in recent years.
In 1997, fire destroyed a vintage wooden hip-roof barn packed with 8,000 bales of hay and straw on the “home farm” at Riverview Farms. The stubborn fire took the work of a dozen volunteer companies to extinguish. The firefighters refilled their 3,000-gallon tanker trucks 260 times and poured 780,000 gallons of water on the blaze before it was doused.
The 1997 Riverview Farms fire turned out to be the last of a string of barn fires set that summer by two Walnutport men. Michael Paul Meleschuk, then 19, was sentenced to 21/2 to 5 years in county jail, and Jason Chad Lichtenwalner, then 20, was sentenced to 29 to 58 years in state prison, for their actions.
The Williams family built a modern metal barn on the same spot.
In 1999, a brush fire that cut a half-mile path of destruction in the area also engulfed a second Riverview Farms barn, that one a storage structure along Mulberry Drive.
A straw wagon, bales of straw and farm equipment, including a planting machine, were lost in the blaze.
In August, the patriarch of Riverview Farms, Glenn L. Williams, died after an illness. He and his wife, Joan A. Williams, had operated the farm, which included a bottling plant and a dairy store, for 37 years. Williams was only 58.
Saturday’s fire destroyed a barn on a neighboring farm owned by the Williams family where breeding bulls and steers were housed. Riverview’s 600 milking cows are housed in a different structure.
“It has been like every two years,” said a distraught Joan Williams on Easter afternoon. She said she could not imagine what started the blaze.
“We have no idea,” said Williams. “We weren’t operating down there on Saturday. We had nothing electric running.”
