NICK GOSNELL
Hutch Post
HUTCHINSON, Kan. — As part of a longer presentation to the Board of County Commissioners on Tuesday, Hutchinson Fire Chief Steven Beer and Reno County Emergency Management Director Adam Weishaar both said landowners aren't getting serious about helping make it safe for firefighters to help them save their homes.
"We are just one day away from another disaster," Chief Beer said. "It's as simple as that. Until these recommendations get implemented, we are one day away from, not 36 homes, we're talking hundreds of homes. It's real."
There were six to eight professional agencies that sat down for the last nine months to give the county recommendations on best practices.
"We're talking planning, zoning changes," Beer said. "We're talking all of this stuff where we're going to make changes, if we're going to address the true underlying issues in the county."
Weishaar noted that without cooperation between landowners and the county to allow firebreaks to be created, it's just going to be rinse and repeat.
"We're trying to burn the right of ways off at these key hinge points," Beer said. "Even when we burn the right of ways off, there's one thing with our mitigation burns, we're never going to know how many fires we didn't start from a cigarette or a chain rigging or whatever down the road."
The mitigation burning gives them something to anchor off of and to work with. The problem is, in the areas of the county without a paid firefighting force, having the volunteers be available on the right day to do such burning is logistically impossible, even if they had the right training. It's taken about three months of work to get one good burning day that the city could use for its mitigation work.
"It used to just be in the spring," Beer said. "It starts six days after the first frost in the fall. It's pretty much sometime in October all the way through green up here in the spring."
Beer told commissioners that just the City of Hutchinson went on 154 brush fires this last year. Most of those never get on the news, because if they contain them to under five acres and there is no property damage other than the burning of the grass, we'll likely never know about it.
However, on days with 50 mile per hour winds and low humidity, those small fires are impossible to contain. Beer said they saw it last year, they saw it with The Highlands fire in 2017 and they will see it again.
His chief concern is a fire that starts in the Sandhills State Park area with a north wind that pushes the fire across 43rd. If such a fire happened it could be catastrophic.
He said the homeowners that talk to him don't have the money to maintain the properties and also the property there is used for hunting leases, and hunters want that ground cover to attract wildlife.
"We're not asking people to mitigate and cut down every single tree on their property," Beer said. "We're asking these people to maintain 100 feet. Two hundred would be great, but 100 foot perimeter around their home."
The areas that are burned in fire district two for mitigation purposes are those that GIS has mapped where fires over the last 20 years have crossed the roads.
The tension is, when the landowners don't have the money, or just don't want anyone on their land at all, what is the county's responsibility to keep the fire from spreading to the next property and what is a situation where they just have to allow the owner to assume the risk.
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