“It’s a big mess,” says horse breeder Cees Klaver (79) from Schoorl, as he walks past the blackened and charred remains of his stable. A large fire destroyed the stable completely in ashes last night, but Cees remains sober. He managed to save his horses together with others: “That is the most important thing. It is only material.”
His brother Jaap, who lives next door, discovered the fire and warned Cees. “I immediately ran to the stable to get the animals out of their boxes. A neighbor boy had already opened the door and then it was saving what I could save. At one point I could hardly see anything through the smoke, then I just stopped firing.”
It eventually succeeds in freeing all the horses, but Cees does receive a scolding from the emergency services who had turned out en masse. “Yes, I was scolded, they thought I didn’t listen well, but I’m a horse person and wanted my animals out of that stable.”
Burns
The cause of the fire is unknown, but Cees thinks it may be a short circuit. ” Hay forcing I rule out, it’s too dry for that. There is also a washing machine in the stable here, that could have been it.”
The most important thing, according to Cees, is that Olympic medalists raised in the riding school, that there are no casualties. “There are three horses with burns that have also been treated by the vet. They have had remnants of melting roof plates on their bodies. We keep an eye on that and I have good hopes that they will make it. It really could have turned out a lot worse.”
Little is left of the horse stable, as can be seen in the video below.