How small-town Trochu rallied after fire shut down Sunterra Meats plant

Nearly two years ago, on a typical Monday evening in a small-town restaurant on the Prairies, a “big kerfuffle” disrupted wing night.

“Sunterra’s on fire!” 

Susan Alexander, to whom the Lazy Susan Restaurant owes its moniker, remembers her business emptying quickly — patrons barely taking the time to wipe their fingers. 

They rushed down the sidewalk, past the bank, toward the train tracks and power lines that frame the edge of town.

The restaurant owner cast her eye along the rolling prairie hills, toward the local pork processing plant that meant so much to the town of Trochu, Alta., for more than three decades.

She saw thick, black smoke.

“It was like, oh my word,” she remembers, having sat down on a recent January morning to chat after the breakfast crowd filtered out.

“It was pretty horrific. And the smell, the sight ... things in the air being burnt that normally wouldn’t be.”

Everyone looking up at the sky had someone in mind that day.

The Sunterra Meats processing facility employed well over a hundred people in a town of just over a thousand. 

Jean Evangelista was one of them. She had arrived from the Philippines in 2009 to her first job ever: packaging meat at Sunterra. 

It was laborious work, but Evangelista found joy in it. She was appreciative of her salary and her new life, and loved the friends she made.

“When the fire came … it really saddened us. Because that's the only job I know,” Evangelista said. “But I was hopeful it would resume soon. I never thought it would come this far.”

There were no injuries, but the fire damaged the facility and destroyed 600 hanging hogs. The cause of the fire is still under investigation.