NICK GOSNELL
Hutch Post
HUTCHINSON, Kan. — Hutchinson Fire Chief Steven Beer brought two Kansas Forest Service staff to the Hutchinson City Council meeting on Tuesday to discuss the continuing wildfire risk in the Hutchinson area, particularly when it comes to the Wildland Urban Interface on the city's edges and within Fire District 2, which is Hutch Fire's area of responsibility. You can look up your plot of land and the risk there online.
"One of the big things we're always looking at is ember shower," said Dennis Carlson with the Kansas Forest Service. "That's what causes a lot of this, the embers created from the large fire outside, throwing embers back into the city and the homes. I think I calculated the sandhill sock being around 160,000 acres and it's around 40,000 acres have burned since 2016, so a significant number of fires."
Chief Beer noted that if a fire is kept to less than five acres and doesn't damage any buildings, then those don't make the news, but that doesn't mean they don't make his staff busy, so his goal is to do as much mitigation as possible with grant funds and they look to have access to some funds already.
"We're looking at a three year grant that would basically take 43rd Street, 30th Street, 17th Street from the city proper all the way out to Buhler Haven Road and make a 200 foot fire break along those roads, working with homeowners, if possible," Beer said. "I think the grant was for almost a million dollars, nine hundred and some thousand dollars on that grant. Those are the things that we continue to push. We try to do some mitigation burns annually in some key areas. We know fire repeats itself. The history shows it. I have the maps of all the big fires. We're burning off 30th Street or we're burning off Plum Street, there's a reason we're burning in those areas."
It gives firefighters a wider area to back burn from, in cases where they need to fight fire with fire.
"We're not asking everybody to cut down every tree on their property," Beer said. "That's not what we're asking. We're asking you to maybe keep this one but take this one down over here. If you give us 100 feet around your house of preventable space, I think there was a picture of a home on there, that's what we always push out to the community, we have a fighting chance. We can save property. We can push fire around homes, in some pretty nasty situations, but when people have cedar trees and vegetation ten feet away from their home, there's not a lot that we can do."
Beer also noted that though the moisture this winter is welcome, if we get a dry few weeks, it will just allow for green growth lower down in the grass, with the top still being good fuel for wildfires.
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