A fire destroyed the pole barn of Paul and Michelle Noble on Half Moon Lake Road on Tuesday night.
The Nobles are parents of two Hillsdale College students, sophomore Alexi Noble and senior Krista Noble.
“It’s a complete loss,” Michelle Nobel said.
The Nobles noticed the fire after 9:30 p.m. The barn wasn’t visible from the house and by the time they noticed, the entire building was engulfed in flame.
“It was all very self-contained and it burned from the inside –– it was all a wood structure,” Paul Noble said. “It just went very quickly. At first it was disturbing, but then there was just sort of an acceptance.”
His wife agreed.
“There’s nothing you can do about it,” she said. “You just figure you go with the flow and figure out how to cope.”
Twenty firefighters and six trucks responded to the blaze. Brian Aube, the chief of the Hillsdale Rural Fire Department, said the cause of the fire was unknown though there were no signs of a malicious cause.
Because the Nobles were in the process of moving, they had stored many of their possessions in the barn. It was all lost.
“If it’d happened a week earlier, I wouldn’t have had to do all that work,” Paul Noble said.
The pole barn was built on a cement slab. The Nobles said though that would make the clean-up easier, they have a lot of work to do.
Michelle Noble said they will need to borrow some kind of front-end loader to clean up the mess left by the fire.
“We can’t use ours because it got burned up,” she said.
