The coronavirus has caused another loss, with the howard fire company forced to cancel their Punkin Chunkin event, causing the fire company to have to dip into their savings fund for daily costs.

The fundraiser at Bald Eagle State Park in Howard raises around $25,000 for the howard volunteer fire department, every year.

It’s an event where pumpkin launchers from throughout the state and neighboring states launch pumpkins from trebuches into sayers dam.

Now, the state is saying they just can’t hold this event this year.

“The state has a restriction on 250 people and outside of that, the DCNR has to comply with that,” Mark Ott, President for the Howard Volunteer Fire Company, said. “The event is held in a state park and so DCNR informed us that we will not be able to hold it with the number of people it would pull in.”

With around 10,000 people at the event at any given point, it doesn’t meet the 250 people limit.

“We really can’t restrict entrance to the park and it’s one thing we would have had to keep track of during the day of the event,” Ott, said. “There’s people that come to the park to fish that day that don’t want anything to do with Punkin Chunkin, we can’t separate those out of the crowd.”

The event makes up 25 percent of the fire company’s budget a year. They donn’t expect to come close to what they typically would earn at Punkin Chunkin, but they’re looking at a plan B.

“We’re looking into to what we can do to do a virtual chunkin and hopefully we get our chunkers at their home bases where live to put their chunkers together and actually fire some pumpkins off and take videos off,” Ott, said.

If you would like to find out more on how to donate to the Howard Fire Company you can go to: https://www.facebook.com/HowardFireCompanyFallPunkinChunkinFestival