A Burnaby cheese factory is crying over about 82,000 litres of spilled milk after a fire knocked out power to the facility for about 12 hours Tuesday.

Firefighters were called to the back of the Scardillo Cheese factory at 7865 Venture Street off Lake City Way at around 9:15 a.m.

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They arrived to find a power pole in flames.

“There was a powerline that ran down along the exterior of the pole into the ground and then into the cheese factory only about 30 or 40 feet away,” assistant fire Chief Laine Zimmermann told the NOW. “It was a main powerline servicing that building.”

Kathy Scardillo, an administrator at the business and wife of owner Rocky Scardillo, said she heard three loud bangs before the power went out, leaving 82,000 litres of milk in the factory to warm.

“It was in the vats to make cheese,” she said.

Firefighters couldn’t attack the blaze directly at first because the powerline was still live, Zimmerman said, so they deflected water and foam off the factory wall and kept the flames under control for about 20 minutes with broken streams to avoid electricity conducting back to the firefighters at the hoses.

B.C. Hydro initially shut down an entire circuit, taking out power to about 170 customers, before isolating the line going into the cheese factory.

A squirrel apparently sparked the blaze by chewing through a piece of equipment on the hydro pole, according to B.C. Hydro.

Five trucks and 15 firefighters responded to the call.

Originally, power to the building wasn’t expected to be restored until Wednesday, and Scardillo rented generators to keep its coolers of cheese from suffering the same fate as its milk, but the power ended up being back on by about 9:20 p.m.

Scardillo estimated the company will lose about a week of production disposing of the milk and cleaning up.