Weather service launches fire-warning site

Fairfax Fire Chief Mike Sankot, whose department has already responded to one grass fire this month, is hopeful the last few days of rainy weather will extend a string of springs with little fire danger.

“Unless it dries up we're not going to have many,” said Sankot. “In the last three years we've only had one each season - it's been so wet early in the spring.”

Just to be on the safe side, many rural fire departments rearrange their equipment in late March, moving the “grass rig” to the front of the bay.

Grass fires “just go out of control so quickly and if you can get there quicker it's much easier to put out a 300-foot swath of burning grass rather than 12 acres,” said State Fire Marshal Ray Reynolds.

Avoiding grass fires, which often spread to buildings and can cause thousands of dollars in damage, in the first place should be easier for rural Iowans, who have a new tool to help judge whether it's safe to burn.

The National Weather Service Fire Weather Page posts warnings and advisories based on an area's recent rainfall and forecast.

Tom Olsen, hydrometeorologist at the weather service's Davenport office, said the grassland fire index is updated automatically every two hours. The weather service also does spot forecasts for local fire and police officials planning a controlled burn, Olsen said.

“We think there's tremendous value in it,” Reynolds said of the fire weather page, which is considered experimental. “To have an extra set of eyes is pretty helpful.”

Reynolds hopes Iowans will consult the page, especially when there's no local burn ban is in effect. The weather service can often assess and react to changing conditions more quickly than the process for issuing burn bans, which are declared by the Fire Marshal's Office at the request of local fire chiefs or sheriffs,

“We get a number of calls from people that say ‘Why can't I burn in my county?'” Reynolds said. “It's kind of a work in progress, but we think there's some value there we can latch on to.”

Such a tool may have come in handy Saturday, when a planned burn near Guttenberg became an uncontrolled burn in a matter of minutes after the wind shifted.

Firefighters extinguished the blaze, but not before it destroyed one storage shed and heavily damaged another.

“The area was a nice spot for it, but the wind shifted on them,” said Guttenberg Fire Chief Jim Cunningham. “I'm pretty sure we'll have more.”

Cunningham said his department urges landowners to notify the Sheriff's Office of planned burns.

“The past few years have been really good,” he said. “We haven't been having a lot of them.”

Reynolds confirmed the chiefs' impression that the past few springs have been wetter than usual.

The state fire marshal doesn't track grass fire reports, but Reynolds issued just 10 countywide burning bans last year, five in 2009, and none at all in 2008.

There were 38 burn bans in 2005 and 81 in 2003.