K-State Ag Today: Safe strategies for protecting rural homes from wildfire
12:07 p.m. Thursday, August 7, 2008
Many of the same tools and techniques used for prescribed burning, can be helpful when your home or property is in the path of a wildfire or grassland fire.
Ross Hauck, the fire management coordinator for the Kansas Forest Service, says one strategy is to use a county road as a fire break.
"Light a backfire right at the grader ditch or right at the shoulder of the road, and let it burn together, and it's a very safe way to do it," he said. "The other good thing about that is, it saves on resources. It saves the fire department from tearing up those trucks and driving through your fields and those kinds of issues."
Hauck adds that while property owners can successfully control smaller fires, it's important to know when to walk away.
"It's like any other fire: When do you feel that you can still put it out, and control it? That's probably -- needs to be done sooner than most people do it, unfortunately. We don't want to call in the authorities, because now it's kind of a 'black mark' against us, in our mind, anyway, so we wait too long and we try too hard, and then it becomes such an issue, that takes more resources," Hauck said.
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