WILLIAMSTOWN — It was a bitter 26 degrees on Feb. 25, 2019, at 8 p.m. and a steady, 25-mile-per-hour wind blew from the west. Sarah Lipinski was in an upstairs bedroom of her family’s 1850 farmhouse, putting her 2-year-old daughter to bed when her husband, Darryl Lipinski, rushed into the room. He had just received an urgent call from her stepmother, who lived with her father, Peter Phelps, a quarter mile away on the family’s 120-acre property. “Your dad’s barn is on fire!” Sarah Lipinski stood and looked out the window. “The whole sky was orange... [with] flames shooting up into the sky,” she said.
When the couple arrived minutes later, firetrucks lined the driveway, and the barn was too consumed by flames to save. Lipinski hugged her father, who watched from the periphery: “I’ve never seen him look so sad, ghostly. . . . We were in shock,” She remembered the alpacas, who typically sheltered in the barn. Running to check, she saw the gates to their pastures had been left open and that they had fled to the farthest pasture, where they huddled together, some of their fleece charred. As the wind gusted to 40 miles per hour, firefighters sprayed the roof of the Phelps house to help ward off flames, which loomed just 200 feet away. It took 45 minutes for the barn to be entirely consumed by the fire, and the hundreds of gallons of maple sap and syrup inside resulted in a sweet smell that mingled with that of burnt wood.
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