The cause of the fire that destroyed farm equipment and caused hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of damage at Vantreight Farms on Sept. 19 was determined by investigators to be accidental.
Assistant fire chief Forrest Owens of the Central Saanich Volunteer Fire Department said the fire was caused by a worker working around the area of the storage facility who had been burning vegetation, but confirmed the blaze wasn’t related to the farms’ new flame weeder which was working in a field along Mount Newton X Road at the time.
According to Owens, there is a clause in the burning bylaw that allows farms to burn vegetation that poses risk to their crops outside of regular burning season.