Major fire destroys poultry shed

Over 60,000 broilers were believed to have been killed last weekend in a fire which destroyed one of the sheds at Jonty Haye’s Charnwood Poultry Farms near Leicester.

The fire broke out on the Saturday evening and it took a total of six fire crews to bring it under control – but not before the building had collapsed killing all the birds inside, according to a report in the Leicester Mercury.

Mr Hayes told the paper that he was “devastated” by the accident and that 60,000 birds was just an estimate. But it was only a relatively small proportion of the total number of broilers on the site, he added.

Fire investigators returned to the site this week, but said the most likely cause was an electrical fault and that the incident was not being treated as suspicious.