Accidental blaze scorches field
Wayne Meyer was standing on a crust of scorched earth under the strong slant of a hot evening sun, waving away a shower of bugs known as springtails that were shooting up from the ground like some weird reverse rain. Soot-covered firefighters were rolling up hoses, and others patrolled the perimeter, gooshing water onto isolated “smokes.”
Meyer knew this field of Kentucky bluegrass was going to burn; in fact, he expected to light it himself in a couple of weeks.
But the controversial annual practice of grass field burning on the Rathdrum Prairie took off unexpectedly Wednesday afternoon when chaff building up on a combine’s muffler ignited, fell into the dry straw below and flashed across hundreds of acres of dry stubble before the fire was contained, thanks to the combined efforts of firefighters from across Kootenai County, other grass farmers from the prairie and Canadian pilots flying crop-duster-sized air tankers full of retardant. Meyer estimated 350 acres of bluegrass stubble was burned. Other estimates ranged as high as 500 acres.
Driven by capricious, gusting winds, the wall of fire and smoke would rush toward one end of the sprawling field of bluegrass – bordered by State Highway 41 and Meyer Road on the west and east; Lancaster and Wyoming roads to the north and south – sending firefighters rushing to keep the fire from jumping a road. Just as the flames appeared to be defeated, the wind would swing around and send the fire sprinting off in another direction, firefighters and farmers in water trucks barreling to head it off.
“That fire was booking,” Bob Maines, fire commander from Northern Lakes Fire District said. “It didn’t jump the road, but it made a couple of good, hard runs.”
The harvest of bluegrass in the field, some grown by Meyer and some by his son-in-law Lance Deacon, had been going on for three weeks and was expected to be finished by Friday.
Two local farmhands, Dick Frank and Stuart Henry, had been patiently driving combines at less than 2 mph up and down the windrows of mowed bluegrass, their combines threshing the valuable seedheads. Henry had just unloaded seed from his combine into one of four open-topped truck trailers when he noticed flames in one of his rear-view mirrors. A quick double-take later, he said, the fire had already whooshed from pretty small to too-big-to-fight-alone. Each combine driver has a small fire extinguisher that is typically used to douse chaff fires on the machine itself.
“I looked back, pulled the headers up and swung up out of there in high gear,” Henry said.
He and Frank raced the combines clear of the growing fire and tried to reach Meyer on a cell phone.
“My brother Wally was out harvesting over by those tanks,” Meyer said, pointing to metal grain tanks in the east. “He called me on my cell phone and said, ‘Hey, Lucky, is that your fire?’ “
Wayne Meyer said he had a water truck, filled and ready, at his house. He jumped in and called for help as he made the short dash to the field. Meyer stopped at a pumphouse that was in the path of the advancing flames, hosed down the surrounding stubble and ran inside to open valves and turn on pivoting irrigation sprinklers to keep the entire field from igniting.
He then tried to reach the seed trailers.
“But it was too late,” he said. “Even when I was at the pumphouse, I could hear the tires popping already.”
The seed in the trailers was worth about $36,000, Meyer said.
Three single-engine air tankers made repeated ground-hugging runs through the smoke to drop fire retardant. Wednesday was the second time the Canadian planes, based this fire season at Coeur d’Alene’s airport, have gone aloft.
“They were very effective,” said Jan Rodricks, a dispatcher at the Interagency Dispatch Center.
Especially in an area like the Rathdrum Prairie, surrounded by roads, power lines, railroad tracks and houses, “They can get down there pretty low, make smaller, tighter turns and get in and make drops where bigger tankers couldn’t,” Rodricks said. “We are very proud of them.”