Fire in the fields

• Rushmore fire

Brian Korthals/Daily Globe Rushmore fire crews were assisted by a farmer with a disc attachment in controlling a cornfield fire Wednesday afternoon southwest of Rushmore. The fire was sparked by a combine working in the field.
• Helpful citizen

Brian Korthals/Daily Globe A citizen points the way to the field access for Worthington Fire Department trucks at the fire north of Worthington Wednesday afternoon.

Talk about it

WORTHINGTON — Quickly drying corn and soybean fields and farmers working at a fast pace to get the harvest complete, along with low humidity and high winds, equaled a recipe for disaster in a couple of area corn and soybean fields Wednesday afternoon.

The Rushmore Fire Department was paged at 1:54 p.m. Wednesday to a combine fire in Little Rock Township, followed an hour and a half later by a blaze in Hersey Township that required firefighters and tankers from both Brewster and Worthington.

An estimated five acres of soybean stubble burned before the blaze was extinguished southwest of Rushmore, according to Rushmore Fire Chief Brent Petersen.

Firefighters spent approximately 45 minutes on the scene, and the combine that started the blaze wasn’t severely damaged, he added.

“It’s never a good scenario with this much wind,” Petersen said.

The Brewster Fire Department was paged out at 3:26 p.m. for a soybean field on fire several miles west of town.

“There was a lot of smoke,” said Brewster Fire Chief John Garmer. “We could see it from town when we left.

“A spark from a combine ignited the bean field,” he said, adding that the fire spread into a neighboring stand of corn.

“That’s what took a little longer,” Garmer explained. “(The wind) wasn’t helping any. It was keeping the fire progressing rather quickly.”

Garmer estimated close to 30 acres of corn and soybeans were lost in the blaze. Worthington Fire Department was called in for mutual aid, and a second call was made to Worthington for a tanker.

Approximately 7,500 gallons of water was used in the battle, and a couple of neighboring farmers came to aid as well, one taking a V-ripper through the field and the other with a disk.

“That helped a lot,” Garmer said. “They rolled the dirt over on the smoldering parts.”

Wednesday’s farm field fire call was the second one the Brewster Fire Department has responded to since Saturday.

Garmer recommends farmers take precautions with the dry weather by having a disk or a ripper hooked up to a tractor that’s parked in the field where they’re working.

He suggests they also keep their equipment clean and have fire extinguishers handy.

“Fire extinguishers help, but they don’t go very far very fast,” he said.

The National Weather Service office from Sioux Falls, S.D., issued a Red Flag Warning for eastern South Dakota, southwest Minnesota and northwest Iowa for Wednesday, citing low relative humidity, warmer temperatures and wind gusts from the northwest at 20 to 25 miles per hour with peak gusts to 35 miles per hour.

“Very dry vegetation in moderate to exceptional drought conditions will combine to produce high fire ignition potential and explosive fire growth with rapid rates of spread,” the warning stated.

Rural Worthington farmer Adam Blume was combining corn on Wednesday and said he had taken several precautions in case a fire sparked.

“We’ve got our tillage unit hooked up — a ripper — so if a field would break out in a fire, we can take our ripper and cover (the fire) with dirt,” Blume said. “We’ve got fire extinguishers all over on most of our machinery. You’ve just got to be ready for it, have fire extinguishers on your machinery and have a tillage unit hooked up, ready to go, just in case.

“There’s really not much you can do to prevent it, especially on a windy day like today,” he added. “A little spark on our corn head from a rock or something could ignite a leaf.”

Tags: little rock township, hersey township, news, fire, fields