(Spirit Lake)– More than 200 acres of land was burned today (Thurs.) in a wildfire west of Spirit Lake. Spirit Lake Fire Chief Pat Daly says they were called around 1:00 pm to the 1900 block of 160th Street just west of the Okoboji View Golf Course…
“It was a pretty good sized grass fire going. We went ahead and called in Milford to help us. We spent almost six hours out there trying to work that fire. Fish and Wildlife came there in the end and they were helping down in that one slough area it was at and they also measured it for us. It looks like we burned just about 250 acres.”
Daly says they have a good idea how the fire got started but he still wants to visit with some people. He says they nearly had to shut down a busy road at one point due to poor visibility from smoke…
“We almost had to shut ’86 down. The smoke was going across the road really bad. We got our signs out, we got the deputies out there to kind of block. When people see that they got to slow down. We had some people coming flying through there and they couldn’t see nothing. If somebody would have stopped ahead of them we would have had a collision out there. When you see emergency vehicles on the side of the road like some of us were, please slow down and make your way through there safely.”
Daly adds there were several challenges in battling the quickly moving fire…
“We had, the wind was the big challenge. Also they had a bunch of, they put some retention ponds out there. There was four or five of those we had to work around. You can’t get big trucks over there so we were keeping the awful big trucks off and putting the pickups and ATV’s out in the field. You’d think at the end of February we wouldn’t be having grass fires and the ground would be a little solid, but you get that wet a little bit and that stuff gets mucky and there was just a big challenge.”
Daly says fortunately they were able to keep the fire away from several buildings, including an equipment building at Okoboji View Golf Course. Daly adds he’s concerned over the high winds in the forecast for Friday…
“I’m not looking forward to that. If it brings some of that back up again there’s nothing much we can do about it but go back out and chase it.”
Daly says the fire danger right now is extremely high…
“The stuff is extremely dry, it’s going to go in a hurry. We chased a lot of acres and like today, you know we had 250 acres out there and we had a lot of people pretty tired after they got done chasing, even riding on the ATV’s and the grass trucks. It’s a lot of work to put these out.”
He’s urging everyone to refrain from any open burning until some measurable rain or snow falls.
