HUMBOLDT — According to Mike Kwasnica, Humboldt’s fire chief, grass fire season may be nearing an end thanks to the snowfall Humboldt received last weekend.
“Things are starting to green up,” he said. “The snow that we had on the weekend was actually a real blessing for us. I know it’s not for some farmers and other people, but it does help us to give that moisture to the ground that we need and to help green everything up.”
While this is promising for an end of the season, he warned that a lack of rain could result in its continuation.
“If the rain doesn’t continue we could go into a dry season, and then we could end up with grass fire conditions again.”
As of May 10, the department had only responded to one grass fire related call during the entire season.
The call the department responded to was a request to assist another department, about 34 kilometres north of Humboldt. Before they could reach the site they were informed the fire was already put out.
Kwasnica credited the low number of grass fire incidents to the success with getting the public being informed about proper burn times and people watching what they burn and when they do.
“Even burning garbage or burning barrels, to not do it on a windy day, to not burn fields on a windy day or when it’s really dry conditions,” he said.
“The farmers who have been doing controlled burns have been doing very good at it.”
While the calls are low, the department is still focusing their training nights on the threat, should the community be faced with it.
Among all their high tech apparatuses, some tools used by the Humboldt Fire Department to fight grass fires during the season are simpler, like their leaf blowers.
“Basically it’s like blowing out a candle on your birthday cake, except with a bigger candle and a bigger blow. So we actually blow the leading edge of the grass fire with the leaf blower and it blows the fire out,” Kwasnica said.
“It’s a lot less work than we did in the past with the brooms and shovels. Once the fire gets too big we can’t use our leaf blowers anymore.”
One more high tech tool used by the department during the season is a Kubota, which is a tracked vehicle that has a pump on it. Another is a portable skid, which slides into the back of their command units, and carries a portable pump with 250 gallons of water.
“We are basically doing the same thing we’ve been doing every other year,” Kwasnica said. “We got our grass fighting equipment ready to go, we’ve had it out, we’ve got it running and basically prepared all our firefighters.”
