Fast-moving fires scorch region

Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Red cedar trees on steep canyon walls exploded like torches. Red Willow Western fire chief Bill Elliott said, "It's hard to believe it snowed and it burned -- it's not what you'd expect this time of year." (Connie Jo Discoe/McCook Daily Gazette)

The fire chief's goal was to save the houses and worry about the fields and pastures second.

Red Willow Western Rural Fire Department Fire Chief Bill Elliott said this morning that unusually early, fast-spreading grass fires along Highway 83 north of McCook scorched about 800 acres of grass and crop stubble, but no houses or outbuildings were lost.

The first of six fires was reported as a "ditch fire" at 3:25 p.m., at mile marker 22 seven miles of McCook. In quick succession, five more fires were reported through mile marker 31, each one on the east side of the highway and burning quickly toward the east with warm, gusty northwest winds.

Elliott said, "It's hard to believe it snowed and it burned -- it's not what you'd expect this time of year."

Elliott quickly called for mutual aid and firefighters and rigs arrived from Beaver Valley, Indianola, Bartley, Maywood, McCook and Curtis. "We needed the manpower," Elliott said, "but getting water on the fires was a challenge," because tanker trucks couldn't be driven off the highway as the fires spread into steep canyons and soft, mushy fields further from the highway. Some grass rigs had to drive a mile from fires in fields to refill with water from tankers on the highway, Elliott said.

"I didn't know where we were going to stop this. It burned corn stubble, disced-up wheat stubble, cane bales. It jumped roads," Elliott said. "With the wind, we'd knock it down and it'd come right back. There didn't seem to be much stopping it."

Elliott said he and firefighters on his grass rig left one field with "flames as tall as a semi truck on both sides of us."

Visibility became a problem, he said, saying there were times, "we couldn't see and we couldn't breath."

Several neighbors with tractors helped disc some fields, but they, too, were challenged by either soft fields or steep, inaccessible canyons.

"Some guy with a gunny sack worked his tail off," Elliott said.

Elliott said the fires could have spread even farther and faster if it had gotten into all the dead trees and brush along Red Willow Creek.

Elliott said he greatly appreciated the help from area firefighters. Curtis firefighters had come from a car accident and car fire, Elliott said, and Indianola's firefighters were helping Red Willow Western track down another fire reported north of the Perry Elevator west of McCook on the St. Ann Road. "We could see smoke from where we were on the highway, but they never did find a fire," Elliott said.

Elliott asked for help from Culbertson, but that department's firefighters were helping Stratton and Trenton fight a grass fire there.

"I really appreciated all of them coming," Elliott said. "I just didn't know where we were going to get any more."

Red Willow Western's trucks returned to McCook at 9:30 p.m., and neighbors kept an eye on hot spots and smoldering, smoking tree stumps and cow patties through the night.

"I just hope it rains today before the wind blows," Elliott said.

Assisting with traffic control on the scenes of the six fires were officers of the Red Willow and Frontier county sheriff's departments. Troopers from the Nebraska State Patrol investigated the possible cause of the fires, suspecting either a dragging chain throwing sparks or a hot wheel or brake on a vehicle.

Nearly 1,000 acres burn near Stratton

STRATTON -- Firefighters ringed a home and Quonset with grass rigs and a pumper truck and saved them from a fast-moving grass fire that swept over 600-1,000 acres of pastureland and conservation reserve acres south of Trenton Lake Monday afternoon.

Trenton Fire Chief Tom Hovey said that the Howard League farmstead lost some outbuildings, but that the house and Quonset there and the home of a neighbor were spared.

Firefighters from five departments -- Trenton, Benkelman, Culbertson, Palisade and Hayes Center -- responded to Stratton's request for mutual aid when the fire started and was fanned by gusty northwest winds.

Hovey said the fire spread over a swath of land about 1 1/2 miles long, south of Trail 12 at the lake. "It burned corn stubble ... grass ... CRP," Hovey said.

"There's so much fuel in the CRP land," Hovey said. "The fire didn't even slow down at the roads."

Despite snow on Friday, grass is dry enough on top to burn easily, Hovey said. "In CRP, all the vegetation is on top, and it's wet underneath. It's like a swamp in places."

Swampy, wet fields created a unique challenge for firefighters whose trucks kept getting stuck. "We had two trucks stuck within 10 feet of each other," Hovey said. "It was a mess all the way around."

Neighbors with tractors helped pull firetrucks out, he said.

H&M Farms and Hitchcock County trucks provided water to keep firetrucks supplied, Hovey said. An airplane was on stand-by out of the Benkelman airport, but wasn't used, he said.

No one was hurt on the fire scene Monday, Hovey said, but the death of a fellow firefighter, Bernie Schutte, was on everyone's mind. "The anniversary of Bernie's death was Saturday," Hovey said. "We were all thinking of him."

Schutte was 69 when he died March 20, 2002, while on duty as a fireman for the Palisade fire department at a grass fire near Hamlet.

Hovey said that no determination of a cause of Monday's fire has been made.

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