Wild Fires

BleuBijou

BleuBijou

Active member
Any ground reports coming from this massive Wild land fire that is on top of Sun City..I heard 75 square miles, but that was yesterday!! Wish the 14 inches of heavy wet snow we got this morning would head your way!!:eek:
 
Up to over 110 square miles burned this afternoon. Winds gusting to over 40. fire base over 150 yards wide with ash falling over 150 miles away. The sky here, 40 miles away turned orange and red at 3:30 this afternoon. This is cedar control out of control! I'm sure the fire was throwing embers and starting fires ahead of the fire line by a half mile or more. It has moved over 40 miles north. This terrain is very rough and not broken by a lot of roads. With 12% humidity, it is a fire storm. Winds are shifting from the SW to the NW about now. That "could" be a good thing, or it could just be a change in direction. After it passes Sun City/Lake City, it should start running into more crop ground and that should help fire fighters start pinching it down.
 
Thanks Troy for the Update!! My cousin said she got evacuated from Sun City, but that was all the update she gave.. I am sure they were scrambling.. It will be interesting following or studying the affects over the next few years!!! Any new reports and pictures would be appreciated...:thumbsup:
 
Blue, google Kansas Fires and you can watch the news reports and read the same. There are fires all over with the 12% humidity and 40 + mile per hour winds today. They are evacuating some of Medicine Lodge, the county seat. We had a similar fire some decade or more ago in the same area. This country is very resilient! It will come back better than before with limited changes in management. On the up side, where this fire is killing cedars in the draws, many of the springs will once again start to flow. The large area free from cedars will be much easier to keep that way. It is difficult to conduct burns in this country for just the same reasons as it is to put one out. It is a special place!
 
Thanks Troy!!!! I watched a video and they just can't get in front of it because of the speed and terrain!! We shall see what happens with the wind change!! I am guessing it isn't just one solid piece of charred ground and there are areas that get skipped here and there..
 
The fire 10 years ago hit Ted Alexander's ranch and so did this one! He said on the news that this one was worse. It will be interesting to see it turn green in the coming months and go through renewal. Should be a game mecca in the coming years. Right now there will be a lot of repair to do and some folks have lost everything. Heard of 2 houses on the north side of Medicine Lodge getting burned last night.
 
The one down side of working that fire in the dark is that you don't get to see all of the damage. The night went fairly uneventful. I did get by Don Gerstner's house a number of times and couldn't see that it had been burned. We did encounter 2 bridges that were lost, a lot of fence and guard rail that had no posts. We worked a lot of flare ups and hot spots. I'm getting too old for 26 hour shifts though! I had already worked 8 hours on the wildlife area before loading up and heading to the fire. Good group of folks. We were detailed with structure protection but ended up helping Charlie Group with backfiring and doing the flare ups and hot spots instead as there were no calls for structure protection all night. Sprayers were freezing up by 3 oclock. Had to go to hand tools after that.
 
The weather today was a serious worry. Last night it was really laid down. It is usually better at night. Sounds like they had some rekindle and runs today. I hope the wind settles again tonight and the humidity jumps. You can sure tell when it does.
 
Prairie Drifter said:
The weather today was a serious worry. Last night it was really laid down. It is usually better at night. Sounds like they had some rekindle and runs today. I hope the wind settles again tonight and the humidity jumps. You can sure tell when it does.
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Ash/soot fell in Wichita at my house in the NE Side of town on Wednesday or Thursday (the evening of the day the fire moved into KS) Smelled smoke again yesterday evening. Sure looked awfully eerie the evening the smoke/ash blew in. Like a scene out of Ghost Busters.


It rained in Wichita this morning -- Troy - get any out west?



This was almost much needed, (tragedy of losing the houses aside) to renew the prairie. The cedars were awful around Medicine lodge and probably part of the reason the fire was so bad. Hope the guy I quail hunted on in Clark County was spared.

All we need now is a rain shower or two to start the regeneration. If there is a positive the fire came at the right time of year. Would have been much worse had this been June/July in the middle of a drought or later.
 
Got a whopping .02 last night. We will need more! Glad someone is getting some. It always starts with the first step!
 
Radar says your getting some moisture..Looks chilly @30 degrees...Hope it lays the fire down enough to finally get the upper hand.. Hopefully some much needed rest as well!!
 
I woke up to 3-4 inches of snow on the ground. If Medicine Lodge got that, that will lay the fire down considerably!!! I'm hoping they did.
 
Right at 400,000 acres burned in both Kansas and Oklahoma combined. I think 273,000 of that is in Barber county. It started in Oklahoma, ran NE into Kansas and the wind switched to NW and sent it back SE. They haven't definitively said what started it. Plenty of cattle perished and 5-8 houses plus more outbuildings. More cattle will be lost due to lung issues. They've modified what they will take at the packing plants to not saturate the market with beef while these lungers come in.
 
They're still working it today. The snow Saturday night really helped. I had heard yesterday that about 16 homes had been lost in both states. There had been 600 cattle lost in Oklahoma and a number hadn't been completed in Kansas. The effects will trickle out for some weeks yet. Getting cattle fed until substantial rains come and lay down the ash and sprout new shoots will take some doing. 9 semi loads of donated hay came in this week from one western Kansas rancher. Hopefully, others join in on that. Plenty of room for Christian charity here. They had indicated the fire was 95 % contained yesterday. I think most of what is still burning is big draws of 1000 hour fuels interior. If the gulf of Mexico would open up and raise our humidity, things would get a lot less dicey.
 
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