Low humidity, high winds mean wildfire could spread Friday

Nearly 400,000 acres in south-central Kansas and in Oklahoma have burned as crews continue to battle a wildfire that started Tuesday.

The low humidity and high winds forecast for Friday have fire crews fearing that the fire could continue to spread out of control.

“We are going to have another critical fire weather day tomorrow, Friday, with the expectation that the fire is likely to be very active again,” Mark Masters said Thursday. Masters is the planning section chief on the Kansas Forest Service team managing the fire.

The fires threatened 2,500 homes and destroyed two homes on the north edge of Medicine Lodge.

It prompted voluntary evacuations Wednesday and Thursday in Medicine Lodge, Sun City and Lake City. The American Red Cross set up a temporary shelter in the old Dillons store in Pratt.

The Anderson Creek fire, as it is being called, is one of the largest in the state’s history, according to the Kansas Forest Service. Crews surveyed the wildfire by air Thursday morning to get better estimates of the damage.

About 45 percent of Barber County – 273,000 acres or 426 square miles – had burned, state officials said at 3 p.m. Thursday.

Another 60,000 acres in Comanche County had burned by Thursday evening, according to the county’s emergency manager, damaging trees and fences.

The Kansas Livestock Association started a drive to collect hay for ranchers who have nothing to feed livestock. Barber County closed two bridges because of fire damage. Posts on U.S. 160 burned, causing guardrails to collapse.

No serious injuries were reported, although one firefighter was treated for smoke inhalation, and several Medicine Lodge residents sought treatment at a hospital emergency room Wednesday evening.

More than 200 firefighters battled an active fire line that stretched 30 to 40 miles in Barber County on Thursday morning. The fire in Barber County was about 15 percent contained by 7 p.m. Thursday.

“There were a lot of homes saved by a lot of the brave,” Masters said.

Conditions had been so bad on Wednesday that crews focused on saving property rather than trying to put out the flames, he said.

“We weren’t just trying to save houses, we were trying to save towns,” he said.

Cause undetermined

The wildfire began Tuesday night in Woods County, Okla., and was pushed north by winds that gusted to nearly 60 miles an hour on Wednesday. The fire started near U.S. 64, said Steve Foster, the Woods County Emergency Management Director said Thursday.

The cause of the fire has not yet been determined.

“We’re still working it,” Foster said. “It could have been caused by a tire, a cigarette or chain dragging.”

During a news conference Thursday, Gov. Sam Brownback pleaded with Kansans to be watchful and report any flaring embers that could restart wildfires, to refrain from outdoor burning and to exercise maximum care when smoking outdoors.

A flood of firefighters

Hundreds of firefighters arrived from across the state to help, including 88 people from the Kansas Forest Service.

The amount of help was so overwhelming that Barber County wasn’t sure how many people had come to its aid, Gaten Wood, the Barber County attorney, said.

Barber County, like most of Kansas, relies on volunteer firefighters. In all, about 97 percent of Kansas’ roughly 83,000 square miles is protected by rural fire districts and staffed by volunteers, said Jason Hartman, a statewide fire prevention specialist based in the Kansas Forest Service office in Manhattan.

Those volunteer firefighters were already taxed by numerous grass fires in Barber County during the past two weeks, Wood said.

“We’ve been fighting fires consistently for the last four days and maybe three or four in the last two weeks, so they were tired as it is,” Wood said. “And again they are volunteers, and they maintain full jobs.”

When firefighters from across the state responded, it gave local firefighters some much-needed rest.

“Some of them haven’t slept since this weekend, really,” said Shawna Hartman of the Forest Service Incident Management Team.

Jeff Culver, one of the firefighters, got about three hours of sleep Wednesday.

“We got in at 4 o’clock this morning,” said Jeff Culver, who attended a briefing at 7 a.m. “Pretty hairy, pretty wild, lots of fire, lots of wind.”

The Sedgwick County Fire Department has a brush unit and two firefighters assisting with efforts in southern Kansas, Fire Marshal Dan Wegner said.

Crews faced several problems, according to Hartman:

▪ Winds reignited embers of fires Thursday that had been under control Wednesday night.

▪ The shifting winds posed a concern for safety of fire crews.

“If they’re fighting fire on one flank of the fire, on one side of the fire, and the wind shifts, that fire could come back, it could push the fire in a different direction,” Hartman said.

▪ The terrain also made fighting fires difficult. The area is a mix of farmland, pasture and brush-filled canyons – all dry because of lack of rain.

“A lot of people feel that Kansas is flat,” Hartman said. “This is real canyon country, and so there are a lot of trees and brush in these canyons.”

Different fuel types burn at different rates, she said.

“If you’re fighting fire in cropland where it’s just kind of creeping and it hits some tall grass, it’s definitely going to have a higher rate of spread with the dry conditions that we have here,” Hartman said.

Gov. Sam Brownback announced Thursday that the state would receive a federal grant to help cover the public cost of fighting the fire. He had no estimate what the final cost might be.

The Kansas Forest Service was able to respond quickly because it was conducting a training exercise in nearby Hutchinson this week.

“We knew when we were in Hutchinson, before we left, how bad the situation would be,” said Masters, “We have a meteorologist, fire supression experts, fuel experts. We knew that if a fire started that day it had the potential to reach historic proportions due to the collective expertice of our team.”

Driving from Hutchinson, they saw a column of smoke from miles away.

Experts call it a pyrocumulous cloud.

“It means the smoke column behaves like a thunderstorm due to the height that the smoke is reaching,” Masters said. “It is a very rare phenomenon that only happens on the largest and most destructive fires. It is very rare to happen in Kansas.”

Masters said it was one of the worst fires he had seen in 15 years, including firefighting in western states.

“This is redefining the book of what a catastrophic wildfire in Kansas looks like...It’s a situation as bad as any western fire we have been on – as bad or worse.”

‘We watched it come at us’

Bob Larson, 85, and his daughter Charyl Zier are among many residents crediting fire crews with saving their home. Crews, including her Charyl’s husband, a volunteer firefighter, continuously sprayed water on the advancing fire, causing it to go around the house.

Father and daughter sought shelter in a green wheat field as about 3,000 acres of their 4,000 acre ranch near Medicine Lodge burned.

Zier said it looked like a big ball of fire was about to drop on them.

“We watched it come at us,” Zier said. “It was so smoky you couldn’t really see. But then the smoke would clear a bit and you would see these masses of fire coming through the air, it looked like they were coming through the air, and everything would just light up and burn. There was nothing we could do.”

Contributing: Tim Potter, Beccy Tanner, Gabriella Dunn and Michael Pearce of The Eagle

This story was originally published March 24, 2016 at 7:24 AM with the headline "Low humidity, high winds mean wildfire could spread Friday."